Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta Archives

Prof. Paromita Sanyal is a professor of sociology at Florida State University. She holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard University, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BA from Presidency College, Kolkata.

Prof. Sanyal’s research lies at the intersection of economic sociology, development, deliberative democracy, and gender, with a sustained focus on how people living under conditions of structural inequality pursue agency, mobility, and collective power. Her work spans the Global South and the United States, examining microfinance and women’s empowerment in rural India, self-help groups and gender justice in India, household debt and financial precarity among working-class households in urban India, and platform labor and its consequences in India and the U.S. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in India.

She is the author/co-author of several books with Cambridge University Press: Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India (2014), which won the American Sociological Association’s Outstanding Book Award in the Sociology of Development category; Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (2019); and Revolution by Stealth: How Women’s Groups Catalyzed a Cultural Transformation in Bihar. Another book, Rethinking Credit: Shaping Solutions to Social Problems, is currently under preparation.

Prof. Sanyal has held faculty positions at Cornell University and Wesleyan University, and has collaborated on research funded by the Social Science Research Council, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and the Gates Foundation, among others. For over a decade, she was a research consultant to the World Bank’s Development Research Group. She has also presented her research at the United Nations, the World Bank, and major international scholarly venues.

Prof. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating how low-income communities in India are experiencing the digital transformation of finance, with the focus being on digital payment systems and AI-enabled credit. India, the world’s fastest-growing fintech market, offers a critical site for understanding the opportunities and challenges of technology-driven financial inclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the study is examining how low-income publics adopt, adapt to, or resist digital financial tools, and how their responses are shaped by social, infrastructural, and moral–economic contexts. The research is bridging scholarship on financial practices and technological innovation, while informing policy by highlighting barriers to adoption, risks of exclusion, and strategies for ethical fintech design.

Ms. Shivani Patel graduated summa cum laude from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY with a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Science with a minor in Chemistry. She is also a 2018 aluma of Upward Bound, a federally funded pre-collegiate program designed to navigate first-generation students toward the path to pursue higher education. As an undergraduate at Marist, Ms. Patel worked as an academic tutor and college prep advisor for the Newbergh/Poughkeepsie Upward Bound Program. For her honors thesis, she worked as a student assistant for the Catskill Hudson Area Health Education Center to redesign Scrubs Club, a pre-health exploration program for disadvantaged, underrepresented, middle-school and high-school students living in medically underserved communities. As an undergraduate, she also served as the Executive Director for the Marist College St. Jude organization, where she led a team of nine executive members and coordinated campus efforts to raise over $43,000 for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Her initial interest in public health and palliative care arose from her role as a hospice volunteer in her local community. For Ms. Patel, engaging with her community is a reciprocal, moving experience of learning, growing, and giving back. As an aspiring physician, she hopes to nourish a positive outlook on healthcare within her community.

Although India is ranked lower on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Quality of Death Index, Kerala, India is described as a global model for its efforts in expanding palliative-care services. Kerala’s bottom-up organization developed by community and nongovernmental organization collaboration lends itself as a replicable, compassionate-care model. While researchers attribute its success to community organization, less research surrounds the increasing youth involvement in palliative-care. Ms. Patel’s Fulbright-Nehru project is identifying key components of the Indian palliative-care system, conducting empirical research on youth engagement at NGOs in Kerala, and comparatively analyzing palliative-care models throughout India that deviate from the Kerala model. After her Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, she aspires to attend medical school.