As the Smitu Kothari Fellowship marks its 9th year, the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA), a New Delhi-based organisation working to strengthen and improve financial accountability in India, invites applications for the Smitu Kothari Fellowship 2026.
Since its inception in 2018, the fellowship has nurtured young writers, researchers, and storytellers to critically engage with issues of financial accountability, justice, and democratic rights. Inspired by the legacy of Smitu Kothari, the fellowship encourages participants to look beyond the rhetoric of lending and “development” and examine how finance shapes people’s lives, livelihoods, and the environment. More about the Fellowship from previous years can be found here.
This year’s edition turns its focus to India’s cities, spaces where finance increasingly shapes everyday life, often in ways that deepen inequality and exclusion. Urban India is undergoing rapid transformation, driven by large-scale investments, infrastructure expansion, and financial innovations. Yet these changes raise urgent questions: Who benefits from urban growth? Who pays the price? And who gets left behind?
Through this fellowship, CFA invites young writers and visual storytellers to investigate how public and private financial systems influence urban governance, housing, infrastructure, climate resilience, livelihoods, and access to basic services. The fellowship seeks to foreground voices and experiences that are often absent from mainstream narratives on urban development.
The two-month fellowship, beginning in August 2026, will support fellows in producing well-researched investigative articles, photo essays, short documentaries, or other multimedia stories on issues related to the fellowship theme. Through rigorous research and compelling storytelling, the fellowship aims to foster public understanding and debate on the financial forces shaping India’s cities.
Overarching Theme
Cities, Finance & the People
The 2026 fellowship will centre on the theme “Cities, Finance & the People,” encouraging fellows to investigate how financial mechanisms influence urban realities across multiple domains.
Key Thematic Areas
Fellows may explore (but are not limited to) the following areas:
- Urban Finance & Budgets: Analysis of municipal finance, city budgets, and fiscal priorities.
- How are cities funded?
- Who bears the cost of infrastructure development?
- What are the implications of municipal debt and “smart city” financing models?
- Housing & Displacement: Intersections of land, finance, and housing rights.
- Financing of real estate and its impact on affordability
- Evictions and resettlement
- Implications for working-class and informal settlements
- Urban Commons & Inclusive Cities: Understanding who owns, controls, and benefits from urban public resources.
- Water, transport, parks and public spaces
- Inclusive urbanisation
- Governance of commons
- Access, equity and public services
- Informal Economy: Financial exclusion and precarious livelihoods.
- Street vendors, gig workers, and informal labour
- Access to credit, insurance, and financial services
- Impact of urban policies on informal economies
- Climate, Risk & Urban Inequality: Understanding who bears the cost of climate change in cities.
- Urban flooding and drainage failures
- Heat stress and coastal vulnerability
- Climate finance and adaptation
- Climate injustice and urban inequality
- The Digital City: Technology, finance, and governance.
- Surveillance infrastructure and data economies
- Fintech in urban governance and service delivery
- Implications for privacy, access, and exclusion
- Infrastructure Failures & Accountability: Investigating why urban infrastructure often fails despite significant public investment.
- Collapsing roads, bridges and public utilities
- Drainage failures and urban flooding
- Public procurement and infrastructure contracts
- Accountability for cost overruns, poor construction and maintenance
- Urban Governance & the Right to the City: Examining questions of democracy, participation and accountability in city governance.
- The Right to the City
- Citizen participation in planning
- Urban local bodies and decentralisation
- Governance reforms and financial accountability
Please attach a research proposal/story idea with your application, mentioning a tentative title and the aspects you’d be covering in your article.
Fellowship Overview
Fellowship grant: ₹20,000
Duration: 2 months
The Fellowship is open to all Indian citizens below 40 years of age and is open to writers in English and other Indian languages.
Application Requirements:
Please submit your application through this form.
Proposals on more than one topic can be sent by filling out the form more than once.
CFA reserves the right not to award fellowships if the applications do not meet a minimum standard.
Expected deliverables:
- One comprehensive analytical article of 1000-1500 words on the topic proposed, by the end of the Fellowship or a short documentary/ photo essay based on the proposal.
- Fellows are expected to get their articles published in a mainstream publication after approval.
- Present their findings on the topic to CFA post the completion of the Fellowship.
Mentor:
Selected fellows would be mentored by .
- Rakesh Dewan, senior journalist, currently, the Editor of Sarvodaya Press Service, he has worked previously with Dainik Bhaskar, Tehelka and other publications in senior positions.
- We have sector-specific mentors, to bring deeper thematic guidance and support to the programme.
Eligibility:
- Open to all, under the age of 40 years.
- Women, Dalits, Muslims, disadvantaged communities and independent writers/researchers writing in regional languages are encouraged to apply.
Timeline:
- Application Submission Deadline: July 25, 2026
- Announcement of successful fellowships: August 05, 2026
- Article submission: October 15, 2026
- Publication of article: By November 30, 2026
Copyright:
- All copyright of the work remains with the authors. However, CFA reserves the right to translate and publish the work after giving due credits.
- The Fellows may be required to attend a program to present their work.
For any queries, please write to fellowship@cenfa.org
About the organization:
Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) engages in critical analysis, monitoring and critique of the role of financial institutions – national and international, and their impact on development, human rights and the environment, amongst other areas in India.
The Centre partners with a range of civil society groups, social movements and community groups to ensure that the financial institutions are transparent and accountable to the people they exist to serve. However, we also look at the South Asia region and seek to reflect a global perspective, especially given the globalised nature of international finance in the twenty-first century.
More about CFA here.
About Smitu Kothari:
Smitu Kothari was a distinguished environmentalist and scholar-activist, who was involved in ecological, cultural and human rights issues. Throughout his life, he tried to collectively forge a national and global alternative that is socially just and ecologically sane.
Trained in physics, communications and sociology, Kothari taught at the Cornell and Princeton Universities in the US. He was also a Contributing Editor to The Ecologist and Development. As a prolific writer and editor, he wrote extensively on critiques of contemporary economic and cultural development, financing of developmental projects, developmental displacement and social movements. Some of the books he edited are: Voices of Struggle: Social Movements in Asia (2006); Voices of Sanity, In Search of Democratic Space (2002); A Watershed in Global Governance? An Independent Assessment of the World Commission on Dams; The Value of Nature: Ecological Politics in India (2003); Out of the Nuclear Shadow (with Zia Mian, 2001); Rethinking Human Rights: Challenges for Theory and Action (1991); The Non-Party Political Process: Uncertain Alternatives (with H. Sethi, 1988).
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