From a career that started in aviation, a leap to working in clean energy might seem quite stark. However, a passion for addressing the energy deficit in India motivated Karthik Ganesan to make the shift. So, how can one start a career in sustainability? What skills should one focus on? What redeemable qualities can impress recruiters? Listen to the latest episode of MAP to find out.
Please find an edited transcript of the podcast episode below:
Shantha Venugopal (00:15.534)
So for our first question, we always like to ask, what piqued your interest in sustainability? How did all of that start?
Karthik (00:25.433)
In sustainability itself, I think it’s really the stark difference between what I saw as India’s resource endowments when I moved back in 11th grade from when I grew up overseas until the age of 15. I came back at 16 from a country like Oman where I was growing up to India where there was a vast divide in the energy availability and how we had to make do with less. And I think it really started from there. It was of course with a view to improving quality of life.
But really trying to understand how we can do it given that we are energy constrained. And obviously that means that we’ve got to do things in a different way. I think starting pretty much then, I understood that India will have to espouse sustainability in some way. Of course, it was ingrained in part and parcel of life, but now it’s become professional because it shows up in all the outcomes that we are sort of seeing for ourselves, whether it’s the air pollution, whether it’s the water stress, or whether it is the… growing sort of hot days in the summers. Right now it’s probably about 42 outside my door right now. So yeah.
Shantha Venugopal (01:32.814)
So that’s really interesting because a lot of people come at it from a climate pessimism kind of view and it seems like your direction was immediately about quality of life and people in India and how their futures were going to look. What was your first professional experience in climate?
Karthik (01:53.209)
first professional experience. I mean, in fact, the job that I’m currently at, which is as you know, as a researcher at CW was my first job in climate. In fact, my first job was probably the other end of it, sort of antithetic. I was in aviation, right, which is, which is, of course, contributing significantly to overall emissions globally because of wanton travel, I guess. But my first job at CW, you know, my sort of my, I guess my third job overall.
Shantha Venugopal (02:15.47)
Right
Karthik (02:23.097)
And that’s where I’ve been for the last 12 years now. This is my introduction to it. I literally learned on the job over the course of the last 12 years. It’s a luxury, right? Being able to sort of, you know, start at the point where an institution was basically, you know, being formed. Today, of course, it’s a very different scene, but yeah, that’s really where I started at CW. And I would say the introduction that I got was through, you know, a faculty member, at my grad school, NUS in Singapore, who happened to be affiliated with one of the government bodies back in the mid 2000s. And he was there in an adjunct faculty position. And he really also, through some of his writings and his work, really influenced me to sort of think about a role in an entity like CW when it was starting up.
Shantha Venugopal (03:17.422)
What would you say that that transition was like for you? How much experience could you bring from, in your own words, the kind of the opposite end of the spectrum to research on sustainability, resilience, energy?
Karthik (03:30.585)
Yeah, it’s a good question, right? I mean, at the end of the day, you’ve got to see what is it that you bring as maybe, you know, it could be domain expertise, right? It could be the ability to sort of frame research questions. When I moved in, my immediate sort of USP, right, was the ability to use analytical tools that, you know, were being used in industry. You know, aviation industry sort of has a cutting edge of many of these tools, right, for data analysis. What is currently, you know, AI is some way sort of like an advanced version of statistical tools that were used and are being used. Optimization. So we started using all of this in some way in my role at CEW. I brought in some of these tools and sort of these approaches. They really look at large data sets because the sustainability debate needs a lot of data for it to sort of be justified. So I think those were the things that I brought in here, not necessarily I would say the understanding of for instance the political economy. That is something that I have again picked up over the course of the last 12 years. It was very much a quantitative view, a technical view if you might say that. But then I think we’ve realized that the challenges that we’re facing today are not purely technical or for the lack of data. It’s for many other reasons and that’s really what is interesting to me today.
Shantha Venugopal (04:54.478)
And that transition also, if I can ask, what made you choose to study public policy after having worked in the aviation and industry side of things?
Karthik (05:05.017)
You need a signal, right? You need to advertise to potential recruiters that you’re serious about making the transition. Isn’t that why everybody goes on to do the degrees they’re doing? They say that in MBA, it’s not what you learn, it’s the networking that you create for yourself. More importantly, I went from an undergrad degree in engineering, which meant that my foundation in economics was very poor, if not absent completely.
Shantha Venugopal (05:22.702)
Absolutely.
Karthik (05:34.713)
The last time I did a course probably in economics before that was in 10th grade or 9th grade, which meant that an understanding of how, for instance, just macro and microeconomics, a little bit of central banking to understand how large financial institutions play, public finance, what are the options available to the governments to finance various projects and how is it across different countries, understanding all of this, at least a flavor of it.
It’s important if you’re going to be in the practice of public policy, right? You just can’t be dwelling only on the technical elements, right? Because then, you know, you’re just playing in the margins. So that’s really why I think I needed to do that degree. So to signal to somebody that, you know, I’m keen on making this change and that I’ve made the effort to pick up stuff that’s needed to play the trade.
Shantha Venugopal (06:24.014)
Yeah, I think that’s really helpful as well, that that’s what that Masters was driven by. Beyond that, you also mentioned the work of an advisor during your Masters. Can I ask what that role was for you? Was it mostly exposure to the writing and the research that was being done at the time, or was it also kind of an inspirational push?
Karthik (06:46.329)
Yeah, I mean, so you’re basically I was an RA, right? So you’re an RA in grad school, you know, that’s what pays for your, pays your bills outside of whatever scholarships you make, which meant that I was able to basically spend time in understanding India’s energy system through the research that I was doing there. I was fortunate enough to sort of have exposure to, you know, as a, you know, as a long intern at the Asian Development Bank.
Karthik (07:16.377)
Right, which gave me sort of professional experience in the way, you know, a large financial institution was basically seeing sustainability. In fact, the project that I did at the ADB in some sense was pre-signed to what I would end up doing much later at CW itself. It was to look at the air pollution implications of large thermal power plants, which is something that, you know, we ended up doing at CW almost like five or six years later. And in fact, government of India came up with new regulations to tighten
emissions norms in 2015. And I was working on this in 2011, right in ADB came out of the paper that talked about mortality and the mobility impact. So in some way, I guess, you know, all that you do during grad school, which is over and above coursework, right, really sort of builds into what you bring to the table. And, but, and I think the important part is, is you need to be able to embrace different elements of, you know, different disciplines, right?
Shantha Venugopal (08:15.033)
So thank you for your attention.
Karthik (08:44.569)
Across different disciplines so that you are able to connect them and sort of make a case for it in a way that maybe somebody who is an expert in one discipline is not able to do. That I think is probably the policy.
Shantha Venugopal (08:54.958)
Right, so being able to funnel all of these different fields of research into a certain conclusion and give your data as that backing to really justify your policy solutions. Absolutely. And you also talked about how your USP when you first came in was in large part the ability to crunch all this data and do these policy making, decision making skills. Now as a research coordinator and director at CEW managing the direction of the research.
Karthik (09:05.641)
Great. Yeah.
Shantha Venugopal (09:21.273)
What is your work like day to day?
Karthik (09:30.137)
I mean, I guess it’s still is, you know, I mean, again, it’s probably, I would say it’s very different from what one might experience otherwise today starting off where I did. But we still have a lot of luxury to be able to just look over the horizon to understand what are the newer problems that we’re going to be faced with in the sector, right? From the perspective of whether it’s again data, right? Data availability is fundamental to any analysis and anything that you do.
Increasingly we are also going to a system where data is going to be distributed. It’s not anymore all centrally provided. It’s not like a government body hosts all of it. So trying to understand how do we as an institution be prepared and be ready for what the future will throw at us and how relevant will we be in an age where AI is probably able to churn out a lot of insights. Then what is it that you do as a research professional in this space? That’s really what I worked with some of my other senior colleagues on here. But that said, there is always something new.
Shantha Venugopal (11:20.366)
Right. You’ve already mentioned both AI and also just the extreme amount of information available today as some challenges that I think would be relevant to younger entry level researchers at this point. Are there any other challenges that they should expect as they embark on that professional journey?
Karthik (12:27.385)
You know, I would say this, right? I think one of the important things that I hope that, you know, a lot of new entrants look at is it’s easy to sort of get it on the roads. If you have a very specific hard skill to offer, right? becoming a generalist way too early, right? is I think, is I think a challenge, it’s always easy to appreciate you for a one dimension. But then you use that opportunity, right? Once you get in, and use the opportunity to basically broaden your horizons, you know, to be able to connect the dots, you know, but I say this, we are still an organization that’s mostly full of engineers and economists. There are a few who are, you know, there are, I mean, a relatively smaller portion who are trained in the liberal arts. It’s a very important, you know, portion of the work that we do, but nevertheless, we are a smaller group. So to the economists and engineers, you’ve got to come in with… solid quantitative skills, right? Because ultimately that’s what translates to evidence. Evidence, unfortunately, is still by and large quantitative. There is of course a qualitative element to it. But quantitative is the part and that’s what you can bring to the table as an engineer and economist, right? Yes, you must sort of try and pick up what the other side has to say, right? What qualitative research actually means is something you have to pick up. But if you aren’t good at that and if it’s going to be sort of, you know, you’re going to be wishy-washy about what you’ve learned and what you’ve not, then I think that becomes a problem. So it’s important that you demonstrate that. And I think if you can, that’s what I’m always looking for. And in a new candidate, I want to see where is the proactiveness in demonstrating that you’ve taken up a data set and sort of sliced and diced it to show me this is what you’ve gleaned out of it. If somebody sort of creates, so to say, like a portfolio of that, I would be more than willing to recruit somebody like that today, as opposed to somebody who wants paper, has a lot of knowledge. And I find that lacking, right? Where people sort of proactively take steps to sort of, you know, do analysis on their own and demonstrate that, you know what, I took up a problem. I looked at the data. I tried to sort of, you know, do an analysis on my own without anybody asking for it. If somebody did that, I think they would score a lot more in my eyes as compared to somebody who looks just solid on a resume, right? With all the grades and the courses, but is not able to demonstrate what he or she does with all that knowledge that they gained.
Shantha Venugopal (14:53.742)
That’s extremely valuable. I feel like at this point, a lot of the information younger candidates are getting is to stack your resume as much as you can, make it look as impressive, get the right words on there, which I’m sure plays some role. But it’s very interesting to hear that if you go use your creative skills outside of your coursework and show that you use your interest and your skills to solve a problem, at least for yourself, that goes further. I think that’s really useful to the people listening.
Karthik (15:22.585)
I mean, it’ll show up really in the way you also interact during a potential interview, right? If you’re able to contextualize what you’ve learned through an example, where you’ve actually worked on the problem and you demonstrate why it’s a hard or easy problem to work on, or how you can make it easy, right? That will tell the recruiter that you know what, you really know your stuff. Otherwise, you know, we’re solving sort of very narrow and muzzled problems, and it becomes very difficult to differentiate between you and the next candidate.
How do you stand out? And we’ve seen that. I think over the years, the good candidates that we’ve recruited are people who’ve sort of either shown bright on these fronts or they just exude confidence because they’re able to show that connection across different problems.
Shantha Venugopal (16:09.806)
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Beyond this, I would ask, because we got kind of off topic of your career a little bit, that you mentioned you had to grow an interest or learn a lot more about the political economy of energy in India over the course of your career. What would you say today is the status of that? Have you been able to find you have blended both your data? Skills and knowledge with political economy and can people pick that up just on the job over a couple of years or is there something they can do to build that knowledge as well?
Karthik (16:43.201)
I think it’s a continuous thing, right? Learning something that you’re not trained in, I mean, even if things that you’re trained in obviously are changing with every year, right? So what I learned in grad school in economics is probably, you know, literally the tip of the iceberg and maybe some more. But specifically on the qualitative side, I would say, you know, I probably know very little and I rely a lot on my colleagues who are trained in that. So one is of course, working in teams.
to be able to appreciate what I think others bring to the table and not sort of being caught up with the one thing that one of the two things that, you know, one might be an expert on. And the second is, specifically for instance, things like political economy, which plays a very important role in a country like India, you know, where, you know, where there’s so much diversity. It is absolutely continuous learning.
Shantha Venugopal (18:29.166)
Yeah.
Shantha Venugopal (19:04.238)
And I have two more questions for you. The first is we’ve covered a lot of the challenges, but I wanted to ask what are some of the rewards that your career and research has brought to you and maybe some unexpected ones. I just wanted to ask since we’ve covered a lot of the challenges of a career in research, what some of the unexpected rewards might have been over the course of your career.
Karthik (19:42.457)
I would say, you know, rewards, rewards, one, I think is every time I speak to somebody, you know, who’s doing a, let’s say, who’s in a corporate job, right? They’re always like, wow, that sounds very interesting. Right. It is, it gives you, it gives you some sort of, I guess, comfort that you’re attempting to, you know, well, if not solve for, at least explore an unconventional area of work.
Shantha Venugopal (19:57.646)
It’s true.
Karthik (20:09.881)
Right. Which people shy away from. Right. Tomorrow, today, if I found a 25, 30 year old saying, you know what, I’m actually working in a political party, you know, and that I’m helping. I’d be like, wow, that’s really impressive because really, you know, that’s where perhaps a lot more people who are driven and, you know, and probably have the right incentives, right. Should be going and working. Whereas you find so few people. So in my group of, you know, classmates from undergrad, I’m the only guy who’s looking at this. Many of them are, you know, they’ve bought their own startups, you know, they’re working for large.
large firms, but they’re always interested in what I’m doing. Not that I’m not interested in what they’re doing, but they more so than I am interested in what I’m doing. So, you know, I think that’s one, you know, one thing that I’m always sort of, you know, elated about, right? That people generally feel like, okay, these are good things to do. The second is you’re never sort of, you know, fighting for a top line or a bottom line, right? I mean, as much as, you know, in my current role, there is a responsibility of raising funding and supporting so many different people.
Shantha Venugopal (21:01.902)
Yep.
Karthik (21:08.441)
The costs that come with it in an organisation. We rarely ever chase a revenue target. It is to the extent that it has to cover the salaries to do the research, but it’s not like there is a profit motive. So it’s less stressful that way if one can truly appreciate it. But I think it eventually becomes a little bit like corporate. So I wouldn’t say this is a great advantage, but I’ve never felt the pressure to say, OK.
Shantha Venugopal (21:31.086)
Right.
Karthik (21:36.761)
Next year, you know, we need to sort of do this much more. There is of course that everybody’s on a treadmill of a different sort. But let’s say we are on a slower treadmill. And I would say the last benefit is that I think I’m able to influence people of my daughter’s generation, right? She and her friends and her specifically, right? To give her a sense of what are the things that are important as she grows up so that hopefully, you know, she will make good decisions, you know, in the way she leads her life and her own career choices, right? Even if that means, you know, if it’s fundamentally trying to work on problems that society is affected with, then so be it. I’m guessing if I was in any other sector, I may not be able to give as much time and talk to her about it. So I would say these are perhaps a few things that I think are some of the rewards that I’ve experienced.
Shantha Venugopal (22:24.526)
I think that’s definitely going to be a draw or the draw for most of the people who listen to this podcast. It is definitely a profession where you can rest easy knowing that you’re working on something good for the betterment of everyone, especially with a good like the climate and the safety of living on this planet. So that’s for sure. And for our last question today, we wanted to ask you and it’s something we ask everyone we speak to.
Karthik (22:27.289)
Thank you.
Shantha Venugopal (22:54.254)
What would the childhood version of you think of what you’re doing today?
Karthik (23:00.985)
It’s a tough one. I mean, I wouldn’t say, you know, I growing up, I don’t think I particularly, I would say the one thing that I was good at growing up when I said childhood, I would say after, you know, the age of 14, 15, I was good at the sciences, specifically chemistry. If you ask me, I actually kind of, sometimes I have a mild regret that I didn’t go into that, you know, into the sciences because in the nine, in the, in the late nineties in India or even in the early two thousands.
It was founded to do a science degree because it felt like, you know, engineering was it. It was you have to do an engineering degree if you have to make it in life. Clearly something that I think, you know, I also sort of, you know, just went behind. But the good part is that engineering has laid a foundation for being able to appreciate a lot of things because, you know, the engineering curriculum is very demanding. Unfortunately, the sciences are taught very poorly in India. Engineering is also equally taught politely right now.
But at least, you know, during the course of my years in college, I felt it was a demanding enough curriculum that it made me think about a lot of things. So in that sense, I’m glad I went ahead and did the engineering one, but I do often have regrets that, you know, I didn’t go into the fundamental sciences to be able to maybe look at, you know, the solutions on the other side, which is the purely technical side, right? To be able to develop, you know, whether it’s for instance, novel materials, right? Or, you know, techniques to clean up the air, right?
Or whatever you might want to call it, right? That’s something. But that said, in grad school, I mean, I was not a child anymore at grad school. Somebody said, you know, Karthik, you know, we envision you as somebody who might be at the forefront of solving India’s energy challenges. This was, you know, 12 years ago, right? Or maybe even 13 years ago. And I feel like, OK, you know, fine. You know, in 13 years, I think if somebody would evaluate me, I’ve maybe, you know, sort of done some justice to what they thought I would end up doing.
So in that sense, I think I’m happy that I’ve stuck to it and I’ve kind of shown that, okay, this is what I was good at and I’m hopefully making some sense of it, you know, in my professional career. So I guess there’s a bit of some regrets and some things that I feel like, okay, you know, I’ve maybe done the right things after all.
Shantha Venugopal (25:18.382)
It sounds very balanced and luckily you are as close to science as you can get without doing a literal second or third degree in it. So that is a really amazing journey. Yeah. And thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. We’ve really learned a lot from you today. And yeah, I really liked this conversation. Thank you so much.
