Tara S. Nair

Biography

Tara S. Nair having completed MPhil and PhD in Applied Economics and Economics respectively from the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Tara Nair has worked on the faculty of Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII), Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad (MICA) and Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) between 1993 and 2007. Before starting her second stint at GIDR in 2009, she had headed research at the Friends of Women’s World Banking (India) for two years.

Research Interest

Dr. Nair’s research mainly concerns issues in policy and institutional development in the areas of pro-poor financial services, rural innovation, women and development, and livelihoods. She has contributed to the discourse on Indian micro finance since the late 1990s through research studies and policy critiques. Particularly, she has looked at the connections between the moral, social and economic aspects of the working of micro finance in the country. She co-authored the Micro finance State of the Sector Report 2013and the Inclusive Finance India Report 2014. She has also edited a volume of essays titled, Micro finance in India: Approaches, Outcomes and Challenges, published by Routledge India (2015). Currently, she focuses on two areas of research: one, understanding the gender implications of the new and emerging institutional arrangements that have gained currency as part of the process of restructuring the rural and agricultural economy; and two, the implications of financial sector reforms and financialisation for household economies. Recently she was a visiting scholar at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de lhomme, Paris (under the Indo‐French Programme of Cooperation in Social Sciences, FMSH/ICSSR(April-May 2016) and at the Media Management and Transformation Centre, Jönköping International Business School, Jonkoping University, Sweden (May-June, 2016).