N C Narayanan works on water, sanitation and climate studies with a focus on the policy and governance aspects. At IIT Bombay, he currently heads the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies that offers Masters and PhD programmes in public policy. He was also part of developing the Technology and Development program at CTARA and the interdisciplinary program on climate studies at IIT Bombay. He is an Adjunct Professor at the National Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore; was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and Visiting Faculty at the Universities of Lausanne, Switzerland; and Monash, Australia. He has served as member of government committees including working groups of the National Planning Commission and Kerala State Planning Board.

He started his career as a hydrogeologist and was part of an interdisciplinary team for land use planning through remote sensing studies. Later he received an M Phil in Applied Economics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (CDS) and PhD in Development Studies (ISS, Erasmus University, The Netherlands). He has been faculty at the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the South Asia Consortium for Water Resources Studies (Saci WATERs) Hyderabad.

NC Narayanan’s work spans issues of local governance, technology and institutional choices in urban sanitation, drinking water reforms and governance, water conflicts, uncertainty and climate change, environmental governance, scaling up technology alternatives, development theory etc. His work is collaborative, interdisciplinary and grounded in empirical contexts, to trigger conversations between academia, society and policy, especially local governance institutions. Such an experiment (CANALPY) involving his students and volunteers for the past five years has now coalesced into a start-up – Technology and Governance Support (TAGS) Forum