Ashwini Deshpande

Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics at Ashoka University. Prior to this she was at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Her Ph.D. and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action issues, with a focus on caste and gender in India, as well as on aspects of the Chinese economy: poverty, inequality, regional disparities and gender discrimination. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals and has edited several books. She is the author of "Grammar of Caste: economic discrimination in contemporary India", OUP, 2011 and "Affirmative Action in India", OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2013. She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IEDRA Award) in 1994, and the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45.