Dr Vinish Kumar Kathuria, an alumnus of NIT Kurukshetra, is a Professor of Economics and currently heads the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Until recently, he was the Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Jaipur (from Sep. 26, 2023 to May 8, 2025), an ICSSR institute. Before joining IDS Jaipur, he was Shailesh J. Mehta Chair Professor at SJMSOM of IIT Bombay in the area of economics. He has been in the teaching and research profession since 1998 after his PhD in Economics from IGIDR, Bombay (an RBI-funded institute). At IIT Bombay, he was Professor-in-charge (PIC) of the Bank of Baroda Innovation Centre (BoBIC) from Nov. 2019 to Sep. 2023.

His teaching and research activities are related to economics, mainly in Macroeconomics, Industrial, Environment, and Energy Economics. Before joining IIT Bombay, he was on a Fulbright Senior Researcher fellowship at the University of Colorado, Boulder (USA). He has over 125 publications, including one edited book by Routledge (Taylor & Francis, UK).

Several of his publications are in international journals, including Research Policy, Energy Policy, Waste Management & Research, Journal of Development Studies, Applied Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, World Development, Ecological Economics, Journal of International Development, Oxford Economic Papers, Transportation Research, Land Use Policy, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, among others.

He has pursued his post-doc in Environmental Economics at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and a PhD internship at UNU/INTECH, Maastricht, The Netherlands. His thesis was short-listed by UNESCO for its Management of Social Transformation (MOST) award in 2000-01. In 2012, he was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal (National) Award 2010 in Quantitative Economics by The Indian Econometric Society (TIES). In a paper in 2016, he was ranked as the top researcher in economics among all business school researchers of the country and featured in the top 5% researchers of the business schools across India (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S03050483 16000359). In December 2015, he was given the Distinguished Alumnus Award in the field of Education by the NIT Kurukshetra Alumni Association. He served as a Member of the Standing Committee on Economics Statistics, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), GoI from Dec. 2019 to Nov. 2022. Presently, he is an official member of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for enterprise survey of NSSO constituted by the MoSPI.