Associate Researcher (December 2024 – present)

Biography:

Amrita Datta is an Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH). Amrita’s research interests are in the areas of migration and mobilities, agrarian change and rural development, village and longitudinal studies, labour and employment, and gender and development.

Amrita has published in several edited volumes and journals such as the Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Gender Studies, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Children’s Geographies, Indian Journal of Labour Economics and the Economic and Political Weekly. Amrita’s book, Migration and Development in India: The Bihar Experience (Routledge, 2023) draws on a longitudinal study—undertaken at the Institute for Human Development—on social and economic change in rural Bihar to study labour migration in the context of neoliberal economic development in India.

Amrita recently co-edited a special issue on Internal Migration and Development in India in the Indian Journal of Human Development (2024, Volume 18, Issue 1) and another special issue on The Future of Urbanisation: Migration Policies in the Post-pandemic World in Urbanisation (2024, Volume 9, Issue 1).  Currently, she is working on a book based on the Odisha Migration Study 2023, a multidisciplinary empirical research project funded by the CGIAR Gender Platform.

Amrita has a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam; an M.Phil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge; an M.A. in Social Work with a specialisation in Urban and Rural Community Development from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; and, a B.A. (Honours) in Economics from the Lady Shriram College for Women, University of Delhi.

Previously, Amrita has worked at Flame University, Pune; Institute for Human Development, New Delhi; Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore; and the Indian School of Microfinance for Women, Ahmedabad.

Website: https://iith.ac.in/la/amritadatta/

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

• Datta, A., Satija, S., Rao Munjuluri, R. and Roy, U. (2024). Unpacking women’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: a feminist analysis of mainstream print media. Journal of Gender Studies, pp.1-16. doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2024.2381125
• Datta, A. and Rajan, S. I. (2024). Internal migration and development in India. Indian Journal of Human Development, 18(1), 7-19. doi.org/10.1177/09737030241251865
• Datta, A. (2023). Migration and Development in India: The Bihar Experience. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
• Datta, A., Endow, T. and Mehta, B.S. (2020). Education, caste and women’s work in India. The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 63(2), pp.387-406. doi.org/10.1007/s41027-020-00219-4
• Datta, A. (2018). Pride and shame in the city: Young people’s experiences of rural–urban migration in India. Children’s Geographies, 16(6), pp.654-665. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1495317