Madhura Swaminathan has 25 years of experience in research and training in higher education sector in the sphere of development economics, with a special focus on agriculture and food security in India and other developing countries. Her research has encompassed a range of issues such as agrarian distress and farmer’s incomes, the role of women in agriculture, climate change and agricultural productivity.
Swaminathan has served on committees of the Indian government, notably as a member of the High-Level Committee on Long Term Grain Policy (Government of India, 2002). She has also served on advisory committees of State governments, as well as on international boards including in the CGIAR system and the UN Committee on Development Policy. Currently, she is a member of the Kerala State Statistical Commission and the IRRI Board of Trustees.
A key feature of Swaminathan’s research projects is primary field-based data collection in varied agro-ecological regions of India. Presently, she is Principal Investigator (with a co-PI from Monash University) on a multi-year interdisciplinary project funded by CGIAR SPIA, which will examine the dynamics of agricultural innovation in North and South India and assess the impact of CGIAR-related agricultural innovations through deskwork and fieldwork.
Swaminathan has guided over 20 doctoral students researching agriculture, food security and rural development, using quantitative and qualitative methods, large-scale secondary and field-based primary data; she has gained new insights from this supervision, such as from a recent student who completed a comparative analysis of rice cultivation and farm incomes in Kerala, south India and Vietnam. She has also been an Editorial Team member of the Review of Agrarian Studies since its inception in 2011.
She is a national of India.
