Funding Agency: Indian Council of Social Science Research

Duration: March 2025 to March 2027

Principal Investigators: Dr Rajkumar Eslavath

Mental health disorders are a major source of illness burden among adolescents worldwide, yet many cases remain undiagnosed and untreated, especially among disadvantaged groups such as tribal adolescents. Improving mental health literacy is essential to promote help-seeking behaviours and reduce stigma, enabling early identification and intervention. This study aims to assess mental health literacy, help-seeking behaviors, and stigma among school-going tribal adolescents across selected Indian states. Adding to that, the study aims to enhance mental health literacy, mental health help seeking behavior and reduce mental health stigma. It also seeks to develop and evaluate a school-based mental health literacy intervention delivered through both in-person and video-conferencing modes. The intervention is expected to enhance awareness, reduce stigma, and improve help-seeking behaviours among participants. Additionally, the study will compare the effectiveness of in-person and digital delivery methods, contributing valuable insights for scalable, culturally sensitive mental health promotion strategies in underserved populations.

Project Staff:

Indulekha Selvan

Indulekha Selvan, Research Assistant of this project and PhD scholar at IIT Bhilai, formerly JRF at DIPR–DRDO, with postgraduate training in Clinical and Counselling Psychology and undergraduate studies in Psychology.

Field Investigator:

Moupriya Paul

Moupriya Paul is an anthropologist specializing in medical and socio-cultural domains. She holds a Master’s from Pondicherry University and has research experience in health-seeking behaviour, ethnomedicine, and DNA laboratory work, along with conference presentations.

Field Investigator:

Padmalochan Khadia

Padmalochan Khadia, originally from Odisha, holds a BSc and MSW. He worked as counselor at an NGO, as a field worker at IIT Guwahati, and on an ICMR project, and currently works on an ICSSR project, advancing social work, mental health, and public health initiatives.

Funding Agency: IIT Bhilai

Principal Investigators: Dr Rajkumar Eslavath

Funding Agency: IIT Bhilai

Duration: 3 years (Feb 2025 to Feb 2028)

Principal Investigators: Dr. Rekha Ravindran

This project adopts a structural transformation perspective to interrogate the interlinkages within the inequality–poverty–gender nexus. Specifically, the study seeks to examine whether observed variations in income inequality and poverty dynamics can be attributed to differential sectoral participation across the income distribution. By decomposing income shifts along sectoral lines, the study evaluates how structural changes in labour allocation contribute to distributive outcomes. The analysis further extends to gendered dimensions of income distribution, assessing disparities in earnings across sectors and their implications for broader inequality patterns

Funding Agency: IIT Bhilai

Duration: November 2023 to November 2026

Principal Investigators: Dr Sruthi Vinayan

The research aims to analyse memory making by the Anglo-Indian community as a forward-looking process through which they seek ways for re-constructing and re-affirming their collective identity. The primary research question seeks to explore how the idea of homeland is imagined through retrieving and curating memories by minority communities and how this process can be interpreted as a case of prospective memory for their second and third generations. This project seeks to engage with these questions by studying the Anglo-Indian community and will extrapolate how intergenerational memory is crucial for the minority community to reinforce their identity, particularly in the absence of institutionalised carriers of memory. It draws from intergenerational memory and reflective nostalgia as pertinent tools of analysis of Anglo-Indian community’s literary and cultural discourses. In doing so, the project will explore the ways in which their mnemonic narratives imagine a homeland as a corollary of reflective nostalgia.

Funding Agency: JPN National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities, IIT Indore

Duration: July 2024 to June 2026

Principal Investigators: Dr Anubhav Pradhan

A 44 km stretch demarcated by generations of master planners into rural and urban segments, the Yamuna’s floodplains in Delhi are home to a vast array of built form and settlement typologies. A considerable portion of this region witnesses agricultural activity, particularly the four revenue estates—Bela, Inderpat, Chiragah (north), and Chiragah (south)—totalling approximately 8000 acres which were carved out of the floodplains in the 1930s. Bela Estate, occupying khasras 169 and 170 from the old railway bridge to the Delhi Secretariat, abuts the eastern flank of Shahjahanabad. This project aims to understand the planning history of the Yamuna in Delhi. It will examine the unsteady institutionalisation of planning apparatuses in Delhi with respect to Bela Estate, delving into the planning archive to delineate the manifold ways in which local governance and civic groups have consistently recalibrated the river’s place in the city from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.

Project Assistant:

Mr. Mohammed Salih P S

Mohammed Salih PS did his post graduation in Development Studies from IIT Mandi, with focus on demography and economics. Experienced in exploring the intersection between climate and health, Salih got international recognition with the acceptance of his papers in the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America and IUSSP's International Population Conference respectively.

Intern:

Mr. Sourav Bhattacharya

Sourav Bhattacharya is an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in History. Sourav is passionate about questions of land and urban planning.

Funding Agency: Government of India, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (Smart Cities Mission)

Principal Investigators: Dr Jose Immanuel and Dr Anindita Ghosh

Funding Agency: IIT Bhilai Innovation and Technology Foundation

Duration: April 2023 to March 2027

Principal Investigators: Dr Anubhav Pradhan, Dr Anindita Ghosh, Dr Souradyuti Paul

The ninth largest state in India by landmass, Chhattisgarh is known for its fertile soil, assortment of bioregions, manifold mineral resources, and a storied heritage of arts and crafts rooted in the traditions and customs of its indigenous people. However, so far only five products and one logo have received GI tag in the state: this indicates a lacuna which must be addressed with rigorous, grassroots examination of the agricultural, natural, manufactured, handicraft, food stuff, and industrial products in the state whose GI tagging may benefit the communities involved in their manufacture. This project aims to identify products in Chhattisgarh across all defined categories which may benefit from a GI tag. It aims to examine the existing status of GI in Chhattisgarh from a livelihood perspective. It also aims to propose technology interventions to make manufacture and dissemination of GI tag products more efficient

Project Assistant:

Smt Ambika Basant

Ambika Basant has completed her graduation from the Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya, Bilaspur (C.G.). She has done her M.Ed. from Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya, Bilaspur (C.G.). Her area of specialisation is guidance and counselling in education.

Funding Agency: Chhattisgarh State Planning Commission

Duration: December 2022 to May 2023

Principal Investigator: Dr Anubhav Pradhan

Co-Principal Investigator: Smt Shivi Joshi (Dharohar Sanrakshan Samiti)

This project studied the built heritage of Barsur—a historic settlement in Dantewada district, Chhattisgarh—to understand its spatial and cultural continuity with reference to its historic architectural expressions. Notable in archaeological and oral records as a city of 147 ponds and temples, Barsur was the capital of the Chhindak Nagavanshis from the eleventh to the thirteenth century CE. The project documented select sites of architectural and cultural significance in the settlement and studied the typology and style of Barsur’s built heritage. It sought to understand the interdependencies between this rich monumental heritage and the settlement’s current social and economic profile as well as the challenges faced by stakeholders on ground in the upkeep of these sites.

Research Assistant:

Ms Divya Chand

Divya Chand is an urban researcher, architect, and co-founder of Lokal Habitat Labs. Her experience includes working with government stakeholders and industry players on strategic projects on self-constructed housing, sustainable built environments and urban design in India and Europe. Divya has held fellowships with the union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Gov. of India and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. She holds an MSc. in Urban Studies from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and a Bachelor of Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), Delhi.