Dr. Aditi Mukherji has had the privilege of studying in some of the best academic institutions in India, namely, Presidency College, Calcutta; Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Thereafter, she completed PhD in Human Geography (2006) from the University of Cambridge, UK, where she received the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. After completing her PhD in 2006, Aditi joined the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) – a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) as a post-doctoral fellow. She is now a Senior Researcher.
Aditi’s seminal contribution to India’s groundwater governance has been in providing a “big picture” analysis of agricultural groundwater use in South Asia. In her early years IWMI, Aditi helped design and run a survey of over 4,000 groundwater users in South Asia. This work was published in several journals and books and till date remains one of the most quoted work in this field.
Aditi is the lead author of the book Revitalizing Asia’s Irrigation. The book received widespread media publicity and she was interviewed by the BBC, Le Monde and Nature News. This book generated new interest in irrigation in Asia and some of the major international newspapers (The Guardian and Financial Times in the UK) published opinion features, co-authored by Aditi, based on the findings of this book.
She is an executive committee member of the Permanent Consultation Mechanism on Groundwater set up by the FAO and Global Environment Fund (GEF) of the World Bank. She has been invited by leading water institutions to deliver key note speeches and organize special sessions on their behalf. She was the Associate Editor of the Hydrogeology Journal (HJ) from 2005 till 2010 – the only social scientist to be ever made as Editor of HJ. She was a part of the delegation sent by the Planning Commission of India to West Bengal in September 2011 and then again in June 2012. She was also invited by the Government of India and ADB to speak at their review meeting on water lending in September 2011 in Kerala India. In 2009, she was asked to convene a special session at a meeting by the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) in Hyderabad in 2009.
Since 2004, she has acted as referee for a number of journals, including World Development, Economic and Political Weekly, Agricultural Water Management, Irrigation Science, Journal of Environmental Management, American Journal of Water Resources, Energy Policy, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Ecological Economics.
