Home Institution India: Indian Institute of Management

Indu Poornima Sasidharan Vasantha Kumari

Ms. Indu Poornima is a PhD candidate at the Center for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru. Her doctoral research focuses on the social transformations from the introduction of large infrastructure projects among local communities, particularly those that depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. She studies the coastal community of Vizhinjam in the Thiruvananthapuram district of Kerala, where India’s first deep-water transshipment port is being built as a private-public partnership project. Using ethnography, she explores how the local fishing community experienced and adapted to various livelihood changes while negotiating with the state and private actors. Indu has presented her work at international conferences, including the Regional Studies Association Annual Conference in Florence where she discussed her work on disaster relief labor of Kudumbashree women in Kerala. She has also been selected for travel grants by the Ireland India Institute and the European Feminist Research Conference.

Indu has an interdisciplinary background with a master’s in development studies and a bachelor’s in social sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). In 2020, she was awarded the UGC-NET Junior Research Fellowship in sociology.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellow at Brown, Indu is examining how context-specific policies respond to demands for large infrastructure projects by comparing Vizhinjam with a setting in the United States. In the rare moments she resurfaces from the depths of her data, she can be found taking photos, devouring seafood, or fighting a losing battle trying to rediscover ‘reading for fun’.

Nithyananda Kallur Venkateshmurthy

Dr. Nithyananda Kallur Venkateshmurthy is a faculty member and Chair of the General Management Program at the Indian Institute of Management, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu (IIM Trichy). He has more than 25 years of experience in teaching and consulting, both in academia and industry. Dr. Nithyananda teaches courses on legal aspects of business, marketing, entrepreneurship, technology management, and strategic management of intellectual property rights (SMIPR) at IIM Trichy. He has been teaching the SMIPR course in France for the last ten years. Before France, he has taught it in Singapore, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. He has published extensively in national and international journals, he is the author of three books, and he is currently working on two manuscripts. He has published three case studies in the Harvard Business School Case Repository.

He has trained over 500 executives and more than 1,000 faculty members on various legal aspects of business and intellectual property rights. He is currently establishing a Technology Transfer and Commercialization Office (TTCO) and an Incubation Center at IIM Trichy. He is also a Member of the International Relations Committee at the institute. He is also a Board Member for two private companies, and he serves as a consultant for a number of corporations.

Home Institution: IIM Trichy was established in 2011 by the Indian Ministry of Education. It offers three MBA programs in General Management, Human Resources and Executive MBA, and two doctoral programs (regular full-time PhD and part-time executive PhD). The student enrolment is currently around 1,000 and there are 35 full-time faculty members. IIM Trichy is currently ranked 17th by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), Indian Ministry of Education, in the “management” category.

Venkat Raman Gundumella

Dr. G Venkat Raman is currently a Professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences Area, Indian Institute of Management, Indore. He is primarily a sinologist, with a focus on themes related to China’s interface with global governance. Apart from China studies, Prof. Raman has developed a keen interest in business ethics pedagogy through more than eleven years of his association with the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Indore and IIM Kozhikode.

Prof. Raman offers core courses like “Introduction to International Relations” to undergraduate students and “Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility” to postgraduate students. In addition, he offers elective courses like “Power Rivalries and Global Governance in the Twenty-first Century”, “Understanding the China Challenge”, and “Political Risk Management in an Uncertain World”.

Prof. Raman completed his doctoral studies at the School of Government, Peking University, Beijing. He is a fluent Mandarin speaker. He has served as a visiting fellow at the Center for BRICS Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai, and a visiting faculty member at ICN Business School, Nancy, France.

Prof. Raman has co-authored a paper published in the Journal of Business Ethics arguing for a novel pedagogy called the “Integrated Live Case Method”. He has also co-authored case studies at prestigious case centers like the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and China Europe International Business School, Shanghai. He is a member of the Board of Trustees, Azad Foundation, New Delhi, which works to financially empower women below the poverty line by training them in non-traditional livelihoods.