Our Contributors

 Dr. Dhruba Purkayastha is a sustainable development and climate finance expert with over 30 years’ experience across the World Bank, IFC, CPI, and CEEW. He has led key national initiatives on transition finance with the Ministry of Finance, IFSCA, and NITI Aayog. An engineer and management graduate from BIT Ranchi and IIM Calcutta, with a PhD from IIT Delhi, he also teaches Economics and Finance of Climate Change at IIM Calcutta. 

 Samrat Rahi, I.R.S. currently serves as the Deputy Chairman of Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port, Kolkata, where he is leading one of India’s most historic ports through a transformative era of modernization, connectivity, and regional leadership. Since October 2021, he has overseen both the Kolkata Dock System and the Haldia Dock Complex, working with Customs, State Government, Indian Railways, and global trade stakeholders. His portfolio spans port governance, infrastructure modernization, digitalisation, sustainability initiatives, and regional maritime connectivity, supported by prior experience in the Indian Revenue Service and earlier work as a software engineer at IBM Global Services. 

 Dr. Radhika Cherukuri is a distinguished Agricultural Scientist with over twenty years of expertise spanning rural development policy, institutional leadership, and sustainable agriculture. As Director of the NRLM Resource Centre at NIRDPR, she has spearheaded national initiatives to empower Self-Help Groups and strengthen rural livelihoods. Her collaborative research with institutions like Cornell and Reading Universities focuses on agrarian distress, nutritional security, and FPO development. A committed bridge-builder between research and reality, Dr. Cherukuri also founded a social enterprise advancing regenerative agriculture, dedicated to creating credible value chains and fostering consumer trust in responsibly produced food systems. 

Shashi Raghunandan is the Founder and CEO of Oaken, a B2B SaaS platform dedicated to expanding farmland resources and streamlining the relationship between landowners and farmers. With a deep background in financial services and payments, Shashi transitioned into AgTech through his work as a fellow at DIAL Ventures. Shahi also serves on the board of MIFOS, an open source core banking technology platform. Shashi’s academic foundation includes credentials from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, and Harvard Business School. Outside of his professional endeavors, he is a passionate watercolor painter.

Ishoo R Srivastav is an officer of Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers and is presently posted at Deputy Chief Mechanical Engineer , North Western Railway Jaipur.He has been a UK Commonwelath Scholar and holds a postgraduate degree in Sustainble Energy Futures from Imperial College London .He also holds masters degree in Public Administration from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

Jatin Goyal is a civil servant of the DANICS cadre, presently posted in the UT of Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu. Under his leadership, the Department of Education of the UT made significant strides in improving learning outcomes — with board examination results improving by about 25 percentage points and the UT’s ranking in National Achievement Survey (NAS)/Parakh rising from the bottom five to the top five nationally. Prior to joining the UT administration, he served in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Delhi, and Lakshadweep. Before joining the civil services, Jatin worked in the education sector — two years with Pratham, implementing ASER and Read India in Gujarat, and two years as part of the founding team of Kaivalya Education Foundation.

He is deeply interested in education policy, particularly in the areas of Early Childhood Care & Education (ECCE) and Foundational Literacy & Numeracy (FLN). He holds an M.A. in Elementary Education from TISS, an MBA from IRMA Anand, and a degree in Engineering from PEC Chandigarh. He hails from Bathinda, Punjab.