Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) is happy to announce recipients of the 8th Smitu Kothari Fellowship for young writers. The 11 recipients for 2025 come from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and hail from different parts of the country across the length and breadth of the nation. The two-month fellowship gives an opportunity to young people for a deep-dive into some of the topics they are passionate about and publish. The fellowship encourages young writers to critically look at the world of development finance beyond lending. This year, the fellows will work on themes such as the crisis of rural credit and its consequences, the corporate capture of Indian coasts, India’s just energy transition amidst steady fossil fuel expansion, the role of BRICS in the era of US tariff wars, and the links between the climate crisis and India’s petrochemical expansion.
The fellows are mentored by Rakesh Dewan, editor of Sarvodaya Press Service, Jimmy James, senior journalist from Kerala and assisted by the experts at CFA. The fellowship is instituted in the name of Smitu Kothari who was a distinguished environmentalist and scholar-activist and was involved in ecological, cultural and human rights issues. Along with these two mentors, we have sector-specific mentors, a new addition this year, to bring deeper thematic guidance and support to the programme.
The fellows for this year are:
Abhidha Niphade
Abhidha Niphade, lawyer and founder of the ARUNA Education Foundation, works at the intersection of feminist legal studies, grassroots justice, and women’s agency in rural Maharashtra. A graduate of ILS Law College and practitioner at the Aurangabad High Court, she focuses on women’s rights, legal literacy, and access to education and justice. Through ARUNA, she advances feminist legal empowerment by centering women’s lived experiences and fostering grassroots leadership that repositions them as active agents of justice.
As a Smitu Kothari Fellow, Abhidha will examine how documentation gaps act as a financial barrier in India’s rural credit system, analyzing how the absence of papers leads to exclusion from loans and welfare, and exploring alternatives for more inclusive credit access.
Anisha A Mendez
Anisha A Mendez is a journalist with Keraleeyam Masika, a Kerala-based publication committed to environmental and social justice. She holds Master’s degrees in Journalism and Economics and hails from a traditional fishing community in Kerala—an identity that deeply informs her reporting.
Her work focuses on marginalized communities, particularly coastal and fishing populations, and explores issues related to environmental justice, gender equity, and social exclusion. Anisha is a recipient of the 14th Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity (2024) and the Laadli Fellowship (2024) for her reporting on gender-based violence and its intersectionalities vis-a-vis marginalized and vulnerable groups.
As a Smitu Kothari Fellow, she will investigate the ecological and socio-economic consequences of a new governmental proposal to allow corporate deep-sea trawling—highlighting its impact on the customary rights and the livelihoods of the traditional fishing communities and on the marine ecosystems.
Chandra Pratap Tiwari
Chandra Pratap Tiwari is a journalist focused on environmental reporting, exploring the intersections of wildlife, ecology, and social justice. He highlights the environmental impacts on marginalized communities, including women, tribal groups, the economically vulnerable, and LGBTQ+ individuals.
Chandra Pratap will explore ‘The Missing Billions: Why India’s Urban Future Needs Green Bonds Now’ as his focus in this year’s fellowship.
Daniya Dabre
Daniya Dabre is a researcher and activist working on the development projects on the environmentally sensitive zones in Vasai Virar (outskirts of Mumbai ). She has completed her Graduation in History from St. Xaviers college Mumbai and is currently enrolled for pursuing law at Mumbai University. She is also a part of National alliance for Climate and Ecological Justice, and lends support to local groups in India.
She will be working on a photo essay that highlights the interdependence between the environmental well-being of the Uttara Karnataka coast and the fisherfolk who safeguard it, weighing the costs borne by local communities against the unfulfilled promises of corporate-led port projects. In parallel, her photo documentary will capture the local stories, folktales, and cultural practices tied to the coast, documenting the loss of social capital and heritage threatened by these developments.
Hari Raghunath
Hari is an independent researcher with a Master’s degree in Social Work from TISS, Mumbai. His research and writing draw on recent years of engagement with workers, state systems, and labour unions, particularly in the urban contexts. He has worked with the Delhi government at the intersection of informality, migration, and social protection. Following this, he has been closely associated with grassroots labour movements, collaborating with independent unions to organise workers around broader questions of labour rights and community well being.
As part of the Smitu Kothari Fellowship, Hari will be examining the intersection of coal extraction, energy transition, and community impacts in India through the case of Korba.
Krishanu
Krishanu work as a freelance researcher based in Delhi. Previously, they’ve worked at People’s Resource Center (PRC), where they led work around urban governance and mobility. Before that, they worked on the politics of Marriage Equality in India with Dr. Paro Mishra at IIIT Delhi. In 2021, they conducted a study in five states (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, New Delhi, Bihar, and Telangana), attempting to understand the roadblocks to access to safe abortions for the sex worker and Transgender community. They completed their M.A. in Sociology from Ambedkar University Delhi, where they worked on “Launda Naach,” which is a caste based cultural performance embedded in the socio-political context of Bihar. They are interested in exploring dynamic expressions and movements of the art form and how it shapes the economy of popular culture surrounding itself. They are also interested in the sociology of Health and Law to understand how certain discourses around queerness and queer bodies are produced via the registers of Healthcare and law institutions. They also engage in advocacy on queer-trans and disability issues.
They will explore bicycling as a just transition model for urban mobility in smaller growing cities, contrasting it with corporate-driven metro and expressway projects. Using stories of young women cyclists in Bodhgaya, Bihar, she will highlight how schemes like the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna address the overlooked mobility needs of the working class.
Minakshi
Minakshi is a socially-active writer focused on bringing to light the unheard stories of marginalized communities like Dalit, Tribal, and Muslim communities. Her work intersects with gender issues, poetry, and visual documentation through photography and videography.
She will be working on a documentary focusing on the lives of brick kiln workers in Gujarat (Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad), who remain trapped in cycles of advance loans or peshgi, exposing the human cost of rural credit crises. Through workers’ stories, contractors’ perspectives, and expert insights, the film will document how debt shapes their labour, freedoms, and futures, while capturing the everyday struggles and resilience of these communities.
Mohd Rameez Raza
Mohd Rameez Raza is a lawyer by training and practice, with over three years of professional experience spread across think tanks, academic institutions, non-profits, and law firms. He is currently on a study break, pursuing an LL.M. in Technology and Law at Hidayatullah National Law University, deepening his expertise at the intersection of law, technology, and society.
Rameez is a regular writer with published columns, articles, research papers, and books. His work reflects a strong commitment to social justice, just transition, and data privacy, aiming to make complex legal and policy debates accessible to wider audiences.
As a part of the Smitu Kothari Fellowship, he’ll be examining India’s dual-track energy transition, the simultaneous expansion of renewable energy and continued dependence on fossil fuels. His research investigates how this paradox shapes India’s climate commitments, development priorities, and the larger quest for a just and equitable transition.
Rachit Tiwari is a researcher and educator working at the intersections of political ecology, development, and environmental justice. He has recently completed his MSc in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a focus on power struggles in environmental governance, community rights and decolonial epistemologies. Before this, he was a Fellow at the Sambhaavnaa Institute, co-facilitating workshops on environment and social justice, and has been actively engaged in India’s climate justice movement. His current work explores the politics of disaster finance in climate-vulnerable places.
He will be working on a research piece that examines how mega-projects like the Vizhinjam International Transshipment Port and the Kerala Coastal Highway accelerate coastal erosion, displace communities, and threaten fragile ecologies in Kerala. Drawing on fieldwork, financial analysis, and community testimonies, his study will highlight how international and domestic finance underwrites such disasters while silencing local resistance and alternative visions of coastal resilience.
Samali Banerjee
Samali is currently pursuing a master’s in Economics at South Asian University, having completed her bachelor’s from the University of Calcutta. She has previously worked at the Centre for Financial Accountability and, more recently, as a research intern at Trustbridge: Rule of Law Foundation. As a young scholar, she is keen towards understanding social issues from a multidisciplinary lens.
As part of the Smitu Kothari Fellowship, she is working on a research project examining how NBFCs and microfinance institutions trap borrowers in cycles of debt and precarity, particularly those with limited access to formal credit and legal recourse. Through fieldwork in peri-urban areas like Najafgarh, combined with secondary data and policy analysis, she will document the consequences of these high-interest regimes and the loopholes in regulatory frameworks that perpetuate financial vulnerability.
Sampurna works at Ashoka University’s Centre for Writing and Communication, where she is involved in a computational linguistics project on AI-driven writing support, funded by the Mphasis Lab. Her interests span environmental humanities, climate and development storytelling through data, and critical code studies. She has previously been a Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University and has worked with GAIA, the Andamans Forest Department, and Kachrewaale Foundation on research and policy projects.
As part of the Smitu Kothari Fellowship, she will be researching India’s urban waste crisis and the expansion of Waste-to-Energy (WtE) projects, examining how government schemes and concessional credit lines from MNRE and MoHUA shape the sector. Her study will also explore the role of international financial institutions, such as AIIB and ADB, in financing large-scale projects like the $7.5+ billion SAEL Biomass Energy Project.
The works of Smitu Kothari Fellows 2024 can be read here.
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