Trustee

Titoo Ahluwalia holds the unique distinction of having headed the three largest market research companies in India - IMRB, of which he became Chief Executive at the age of 30; then MARG, which he set up in 1983, and subsequently ORG, which merged with MARG in 1996.

A History graduate from St Stephen’s College in Delhi, with a post-graduate Diploma in Management Studies from London, he started his career as a social researcher at Research Services Ltd in London.

He was India's first National Representative to ESOMAR, the world body representing the survey research professions.

In 2004, Titoo Ahluwalia took early retirement from his position as CEO of ACNielsen ORG-MARG, to pursue on a full-time basis his interest in issues concerning civil society. He is now Managing Trustee of Citizens for Peace and Trustee of four other voluntary organizations involved with work in many different areas such as communal harmony, urbanization education, rural development and accountability in public institutions. He is also Chairman of Conscious Food Pvt Ltd, India’s first organic food company.

Titoo Ahluwalia has addressed conferences in many countries. His views on social attitudes and practices in India have been quoted widely in the media, including the BBC, CNBC, New York Times, The Times of London, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune.

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Arjun Appadurai serves as Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Professor in the Social Sciences. Until recently, Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School. He was formerly William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Cities and Globalization at Yale University.

Arjun Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).

He was born and educated in Bombay. He graduated from St. Xavier's High School and earned his Intermediate Arts degree from Elphinstone College before coming to the United States. He earned his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1967, and his M.A. (1973) and PhD (1976) from the University of Chicago.

During his academic career, he has held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, and has held visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, Columbia University and New York University. He serves on several scholarly and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe and India. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006, Duke University Press) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (1996, University of Minnesota Press; 1997, Oxford University Press, Delhi). His previous scholarly publications have covered such topics as religion, cuisine, agriculture and mass culture in India.

He is one of the founding editors, along with Carol A. Breckenridge, of the journal Public Culture and was the founding Director of the Chicago Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago (1992-1998), during which time he held the Richard J. and Barbara E. Franke Professorship. He is one of the founders of the Interdisciplinary Network on Globalization, a consortium of institutions in various parts of the world devoted to the study of global politics and culture.

Arjun Appadurai has held numerous fellowships and scholarships and has received several scholarly honors, including residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (California) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an Individual Research Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (New York). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served or has served on many national and international advisory bodies, including the advisory council of the Smithsonian Institute, and the governing boards of: the Center for Arts and Culture (Washington, DC), the Institute for Cultural Pluralism (Rio de Janeiro), the Research Center for Religion and Society (Amsterdam), Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, and the Social Science Research Council (New York).

He has served as a consultant or advisor to a wide range of public and private organizations, including many major foundations (Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller); UNESCO; UNDP; WIDER (World Institute for Development Economics Research); the World Bank; the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the National Science Foundation. His current research has three foci: ethnic violence in the context of globalization, with a special focus on ethnic relations in Mumbai in the late 1980's and 1990's; a longer term collaborative project on the cultural dimensions of social crisis in Mumbai, focusing on housing, poverty, media and violence; a comparative ethnographic project on grass-roots globalization, intended to illuminate emergent transnational organizational forms and new practices of sovereignty.

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Srilatha Batliwala has been associated with PUKAR as an Advisor since its inception. She has now joined PUKAR in a more active role as Co-Chair of the President of the Board of Trustees from July 2009. A well-known feminist, researcher and an independent scholar based in Bangalore, Srilatha worked for nearly thirty five years in India and internationally in a range of social change and gender justice activities that spanned grassroots organizing, advocacy, and research, with a deep commitment to gender equality & the women’s movement in India.

Later she joined Ford Foundation, US, handling programs related to strengthening international civil society and the nonprofit sector. It was in that capacity that Srilatha was responsible for transforming the idea of PUKAR, as envisioned by Prof Arjun Appadurai - PUKAR’s Founder Trustee, into a reality. The task of “delivering baby PUKAR” was successfully done by Srilata in 2001.

Srilatha is an India-based Civil Society Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Non-profit Organizations, Harvard University. Though she is best known for her work on gender equality and women’s empowerment, her work at Harvard focuses on transnational civil society. She has co-edited a volume entitled “Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction” (Kumarian Press, August 2006) and is working on her second book, on transnational grassroots movements. She also has published extensively on a range of development and women’s issues including the widely used “Women’s Empowerment in South Asia – Concepts and Practices”.

A multifaceted and multi-talented woman, Srilatha is Chair of the Board of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and a member of the Board of PLAN International and Gender at Work. Additionally she freelances in areas of program and organizational evaluations, gender and organizational change, and helping practitioners generate new concepts and theories to challenge dominant discourses.

Currently, Srilatha is Senior Advisor to the project on Feminist Organizations and Movements of the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) and the Chair of the Board of the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), New York among others.

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School of Architecture and at Harvard University. He established his private practice in 1990, with a wide range of projects from Interior Design, Architecture to Urban Planning and Conservation. Rahul Mehrotra has authored several monographs on Bombay, and has written extensively on Architecture, Urban Design, and Planning in India.

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Zia Mody passed her Law from the University of Cambridge, UK in 1978. She was enrolled as an Advocate with the Bar Council of Maharashtra & Goa in 1978 and did her LLM from Harvard Law School. Zia Mody was then admitted as a member of the New York State Bar by examination in 1980. She started her practice as a Corporate Associate, Baker & McKenzie, New York 1979 to 1983.

Then she started her own practice from 1984 and then went into partnership and started the firm, CZB & Partners, Advocates & Solicitors between January 2002 and March 2004. CZB & Partners then merged with Ajay Bahl & Associates and was renamed as AZB & Partners, Advocates & Solicitors (Mumbai, New Delhi & Bangalore) from April 2004 onwards. The firm has over 120 lawyers.

Zia Mody is a Trustee of the Bahai School, New Era High School, in Panchgani. She is a Member of the CCI Committee on Capital Markets and a Member of the CII National Council on Corporate Governance and Regulatory Framework.

Zia Mody has been awarded the “Business Woman of the Year” by the Financial Express in the category of “The Best Knowledge Manager”. She has been selected as one of the 25 Most Powerful Women in Indian Business by Business Today. She was selected as one of India’s 100 Most Powerful CEOS by the Economic Times. The American Lawyer has identified Zia Mody as being one of “country’s leading stars”. She was nominated as one of the world’s leading practitioners by “The International Who’s Who of Private Funds Lawyers 2006 and Franchise Lawyers”. She was appointed as the Director of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, Hongkong in January 2006 and has also been appointed as a member of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal for a period of five years from July 1, 2007 by the World Bank.

In its 2002-03 edition, the Asia Pacific Legal 500 has ranked CZB & Partners as among the leading Firms in the Infrastructure Sector, and has ranked Zia Mody as among the leading individuals in the Infrastructure Sector.

Identified as a Highly Recommended lawyer by the Global Counsel 3000 in the field of Company and Corporate Transactions and Private Equity/Venture Capital.

AZB & Partners was nominated as the best Indian National Law Firm 2006 by the International Financial Law Review.

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Sheela Patel is the Founder Director of SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres) - a non-profit society working in issues of equity and social justice in India and SPARC Samudhaya Nirman Sahayak (SSNS) - a set up to assist slum communities take on construction initiatives in cities. She has a Masters in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.

She is a member of World Health Organization Task Force on the Social Determinants of Health, Chair of the Board of Shack Dweller’s International Board, Chair of the Policy Advisory Board of the Cities Alliance (World Bank) and has been a Member of the ICSSR Committee for IDPAD (Indo Dutch research projects). She is also a member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission of the Government of India.

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