Saumitra Sinha

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Saumitra Sinha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the project “Innovative Solutions to Interlinked Water Insecurity, Poverty, and Poor Health in Africa's Urban Slums" at the Pulte Institute for Global Development. His research focuses on improving decision-making processes to mitigate water-related risks in urban areas of the Global South using a mixed-methods approach. He earned his doctoral degree from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). In addition, he holds a master’s degree in regional planning from Cornell University and a bachelor's degree in architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India.

His dissertation evaluated Delhi’s water subsidy policy from the perspective of Delhi’s residents, utilizing mixed-methods research. He conducted stated preference choice experiments to determine how acceptable residents of Delhi find budget reallocations from water subsidies to improve water services, as well as their views on targeting strategies for water subsidies. Saumitra’s dissertation also incorporated a qualitative study that identified various types of informal water payment and sharing arrangements between landlords and renters.

For his interdisciplinary research, Saumitra was awarded the Royster Society of Fellows Dissertation Completion Fellowship at UNC. While at UNC, he also received the Drucilla French Graduate Student Fellowship, the Graduate Summer Research Grant, and the Modern Indian Studies Conference Travel Grant; he was recognized as the best teaching assistant by planning master’s students in 2021. One of the chapters from his dissertation was judged to be the best student paper on international planning presented at the 2023 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) conference by the Global Planning Educators Interest Group (GPEIG).

Saumitra has previously researched floodplain management in Upstate New York and Kolkata, India, and has supported the Tata-Cornell Institute TARINA on agriculture and nutrition in India using GIS. Before starting his graduate studies, he worked as an architect and researcher in India for two years.