Senior Research Fellow
Sharachchandra (Sharad) Lele received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay (1984) but then decided that environmental studies was more exciting and socially relevant. So he did an M.S. on the environmental impacts of large dams at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (1987) and then a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley (1993), focusing on forest use in the Western Ghats. Since then, he has worked at the Pacific Institute, Harvard University, and Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment & Development. He is now with the Centre for Environment & Development at ATREE, Bangalore, which is an applied research institute working on conservation and sustainable development.
Sharad is an interdisciplinary environmental researcher, trying to bridge the natural sciences, economics, and political science in understanding the concepts of and pathways to environmentally sustainable and socially just development. He has worked on sustainable forest management and forest governance, forest hydrology and farmer linkages, watershed development and its long-term impacts, and more recently on governance of water supply and water pollution. He is currently leading a major project on the impacts of climate change on water management in rapidly urbanizing basins in peninsular India, and is involved in other studies on water pollution regulation and sustainable water for Bangalore city. He has served on the MoEF-MoTA Forest Rights Act committee, the Karnataka High Court’s Elephant Task Force, and the Bellandur Lake Expert Committee. He is currently on MoEF’s Expert Appraisal Committee for Coal Mining and Thermal Power Plant.