Sushil Saigal works on issues related to natural resource management, with a particular focus on forestry in India. His specific interests include community forestry, farm and agro forestry, small forestry enterprises, forest certification, and payments for environmental services. He has over 12 years of work experience in the Indian forestry sector. He started his career at Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development (SPWD), where he coordinated a national network on Joint Forest Management (JFM). During this period, he also worked on several field projects in collaboration with grassroots voluntary agencies. He subsequently joined Ecotech Services (ETS), where he coordinated a research project on the role of private sector in Indian forestry. At Winrock, he coordinated Resource Unit for Participatory Forestry (RUPFOR) and worked closely with Ministry of Environment and Forests before taking over as the Program Manager of NRM Division in 2004.
Sushil is the principal author of the book The New Foresters (IIED, 2002) that examines the role of private sector in Indian forestry and co-editor of another book Root to Canopy (CFA & Winrock, 2004) that analyses the experience of the first decade of JFM in India. Sushil was educated at Cambridge (MPhil Environment & Development), Oxford (MSc Forestry), IIFM (MBA), and Delhi (BSc Zoology). He has also attended certificate programmes at UC Berkeley and East-West Center. He is currently on study leave and pursuing PhD in Political Ecology at Cambridge.
Adaptation Group
Chetan Agarwal (Senior Program Officer) has worked to sustain forests, in the Western Himalayas, nationally, and elsewhere in Asia. His interests include institutional, market and regulatory analysis for sustainable production of forest produce and ecosystem services, community ownership, and the application of tools such as certification, incentive mechanisms, GIS and Remote Sensing for the same. Chetan has a masters in rural management from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), and a masters in public affairs (environmental policy) from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), Indiana University, Bloomington. Shahnaz Parveen (Senior Program Officer) holds twin masters, one in Psychology and the second in Education from Aligarh Muslim University. She has worked for more than 20 years at the grassroot level, especially with villagers and project beneficiaries. She has several years of working experience in projects focusing on women related issues. More than six years of this experience were dedicated to a national-level project called Mahila Samakhya. At WII, she has coordinated a project on solar photovoltaic applications in Bhadohi district, Uttar Pradesh for over six years. She is also contributing her experience and skills to a flagship project of Winrock India, remote village electrification using straight vegetable oil, in Kawardha, Chhattisgarh. She has vast experience on community development programs.
Mohammad Aatish Khan (Program Officer) has undertaken a number of projects with tribal and marginalized communities, government bodies and various funding agencies in the areas of natural resource management, climate change adaptation, governance, renewable energy and policy. He has a wide experience of project management, proposal development, economic analysis, statistical assessments, action research, monitoring & evaluation and policy reviews. He has working knowledge of software packages such as SPSS, ERDAS, ArcGIS etc. Prior to joining WII, he has worked with Sambodhi Research Pvt Ltd. in the area of Project Management and Research.
He has undertaken projects for Central Ministries and international organizations such as MoEF, MoRD, MNRE, MoP, World Bank, DFID, DECC, USAID, UNDP, Oxfam, ILO, UNICEF, Rockefeller Foundation, GTZ, JICA, KfW, European Commission, IUCN, etc.
He has done PGDFM (Specialization in Environmental Management) from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal and Bachelors of Engineering (Honours) in Electronics and Communication from Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, Bhopal. He is also a recipient of the IIFM's Budding Researcher's Award-2009 and has published several research papers. He has been invited for paper presentation in international conferences and workshops.
Sunpreet Kaur (Program Officer) has been working across cross-cutting fields of Environment, Energy, Natural resources and Rural Development. She has an extensive experience of Project Management, Policy Reviews, Program Implementation, Action Research, Economic Assessments, Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) and Capacity Building. Presently at Winrock, she has been associated with a number of projects concerning the various Central and State govt. programmes and schemes. She has a sound understanding of technical, social and institutional issues; across sectors such as climate change, renewable energy, adaptation, natural resource management, forestry, livelihoods, vulnerability assessments and rural development. She has been working on issues related to the rural communities, with an experience of working with the local institutions, local & national NGOs, and the central & state governments.
Prior to joining WII, she has worked with UNIDO and MoEF on India's National Implementation Plan under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and was associated with various organisations such as NEERI, NIIST, CPCB, CPRI. She had also undertaken a research study on Assessment of the financial risks & opportunities due to global climate change, and how these impact livelihoods.
She is a silver-medalist in MBA (Environmental Management) from the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal. She is a recipient of the IIFM's Budding Researcher's Award – 2009 for the research paper on "The Best Practice approach to Rural Household Solid Waste Management through Benchmarking" and has also published a paper in the journal for Community Forestry.
Vineet Jain (Program Associate) has done M.Sc. in Environmental Studies from TERI University and B.Sc. in Physics from Hindu College, Delhi University. He has done his internship on "Mass Balance of Himalayan Glaciers: A Case Study of East Rathong and Kolahoi Glacier" in TERI, Delhi and on" Literature Review of Technology Transfer" in Freie University, Germany. Mahendra Kumar Maurya (Project Officer) holds a postgraduate diploma in Rural Development and Management, and has over 8 years of working experience in the renewable energy, environment, and watershed development sectors. He has contributed to the solar photovoltaic applications project in Bhadohi by supporting various activities such as demonstrations, capacity building, and developing linkages with other stakeholders in the region.
Sanyogita Rawat (Associate – Program Support) is a graduate from University of Delhi and holds a PGD in Office Management from YMCA, Delhi. At WII, she is currently assisting the Natural Resources Management program in all its programmatic activities.
Biodiversity Group
Monalisa Sen (Program Officer) is a post graduate in Environmental Biology from University of Delhi and is presently pursuing her PhD in Environmental Studies from the same University. Apart from her PhD thesis on ‘ Avifauna and Community Dynamics in the Aravallis’, she has experience of working in the field of Restoration Ecology, particularly in Asola-Bhatti wildlife sanctuary, Yamuna and Aravalli Biodiversity parks. Her major work responsibilities included extensive field ecological surveys of the Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan regions of the Aravallis; collection and multiplication of native flora of Aravallis; micro-planning of the plantations to be carried out; isolation and mass multiplication of nitrogen fixing bacteria, and helping in the organization of educational camps for school children. She has also worked on the Flora of Delhi. Prior to joining WII, she has been associated as a Consultant with IUCN- India.
Dr. K M Jayahari (Program Officer) has more than seven years experience in working in the field of Biodiversity Conservation. He has done his PhD on the “Ecology and behaviour of small mammals in the Western Ghats of Kerala, Southern India, with special reference to rodents”, from FRI University, Dehra Dun. He began his career as a Research Fellow in the Wildlife Division of Kerala Forest Research institute, Peechi, Kerala. He also played a key role in the finalization of the State Biodiversity Action Plan (SBSAP) for Kerala, 2005. Before joining WII, he was working as a Project Officer in the Southern Western Ghats Landscape Programme of WWF-India. His major responsibilities were identification of the conservation issues of the Southern Western Ghats, and networking with State Forest Departments, different forest dependent communities, NGOs, research organizations and other conservation stakeholders.
Forest Management Group
Gitika Goswami (Program Officer) ) has a multidisciplinary background and has been working across cross-cutting fields of Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Management. For the last 14 years, she has been involved in Project Designing, Management and Implementation of projects in different priority landscapes of India. She has undertaken Policy Research and Reviews, Impact Assessment Studies of diverse project within the environment sector. She has the experience of designing and coordinating research using different participatory tools. She has sound knowledge and understanding of technical, social and institutional issues including forestry, climate change, adaptation, natural resource management, livelihoods and rural development. She has also worked for community mobilization, developing awareness generation strategies, organizing multi-stakeholders dialogues for diverse projects, undertaken capacity building exercises for the small and medium scale wood processing industries. She has extensive experience in working with the local institutions, relevant National Ministries such as MOEF, MORD, MNRE & state governments departments such as Forest Departments, Rural Development Departments, Research Institutes and different bilateral agencies.
Prior to joining Winrock International India she has worked with WWF-India for ten years and managed a number of conservation and development projects under implementation in different ecologically sensitive landscapes. She was also actively involved in strategy development of the Forest Conservation programmes and the Bioenergy programme of WWF-India in her tenure.
Apart from having a post graduate degree in Geology from University of Calcutta she was awarded the prestigious British Chevening Scholarship and has done the certificate course in Environment Management and Sustainable Development from University of North Wales, UK. Currently she is pursuing PhD in Forestry from Forest Research Institute, Dehradun. She has published a number of papers in different national and international journals and books.
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