Chair Person

Kanchan Mathur
Chair Person
Kanchan Mathur superannuated as the Officiating Director of the Institute of Development Studies in 2018. Since then she is Professor (Honorary) at the IDS Jaipur. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK and has headed the UNFPA supported Women’s Resource Centre at the Rajasthan Institute of Public Administration for three years.

She has more than 35 years of experience in applied research, evaluation and policy analysis in the field of social and rural development, especially focusing on gender issues. Her work spans close networking with grassroots level NGOs to Bilateral, Multilateral International Organisations, UN Agencies, The World Bank and governments at the senior level. The key focus area of her work has been women’s rights and empowerment. She is the author of ‘Countering Gender Based Violence: Initiatives in Collective Action’ (Sage 2004) and has published extensively in journals of national and international repute. Her current areas of interest include understanding the politics and intersectionalities of gender cutting across sectors, education of marginalized girls, gender and rural local governance, sexual and reproductive health including menstrual health and hygiene management, and Water Sanitation and Health (WaSH) issues in urban settings. In the last four years she has been the Team Lead for several large projects including the NITI Aayog supported ‘Evaluation of the Women and Child Development Sector’ a pan India study covering 11 states and 1 Union territory; Socially Inclusive WASH initiatives in India’s urban slums, Mapping and Analysis of Social Protection Schemes for the Girl Child in Rajasthan, Impact of COVID-19 on the Girls’ secondary education and Impact of COVID-19 on health of women and children in Rajasthan.