Vandana Vasudevan is a PGDM from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and had a long corporate career in Standard Chartered, ICICI Bank and HT Media. Ltd. She joined the international development sector following a Masters’s in Urbanism and a PhD from the University of Grenoble, France in 2019 in urban development.

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She has worked on projects with IFC Washington, World Bank India, Asian Development Bank and World Resources Institute (WRI). She was part of the team which authored the World Bank’s tool kit on gender mainstreaming our public places, released in 2022. She has written over a hundred articles for leading English language dailies in India and was a fortnightly columnist for Mint and Daily News Analysis (DNA) for several years. She is the author of two non-fiction books. Her first book “Urban Villager: Life in an Indian Satellite Town” (SAGE publications, 2013) is about the impact of India’s rapid urbanisation is widely read and appreciated in several countries.

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She is a Visiting fellow in the Centre for Social and Economic Policy (Formerly Brookings Institute) in New Delhi and is the founder of a research organization Naagrik Foundation for Cities.