Can you imagine working at the science-policy interface in India without a background in science? It might seem impossible, but Anuja Malhotra’s career journey, featured in the latest episode of our podcast, MAP, proves that with passion and willingness to learn, it is possible.
Although she studied Economics and didn’t initially specialise in science, inspiring professors, a passion for conservation, and a thirst for on-the-job learning shaped her career path.
Curious about how she made this transition and what her job entails today? Tune in to learn from her remarkable career journey.
Below is an edited transcript of the episode:
Shantha Venugopal (00:08.369)
Our guest today is Ms. Anuja Malhotra. She is the Policy Manager at the Center for Policy Design at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment(ATREE0, currently coordinating the implementation of ATREE’s grassland restoration programs in Maharashtra, as well as policy advocacy for environment-related issues in India. She specialises in ecological economics and has published many research papers and articles.
She has experience in community engagement and outreach with a focus on promoting inclusivity and bringing stakeholders together. Welcome Ms. Anuja Malhotra
Anuja Malhotra (00:43.181)
Hi Shanta, thank you. Thank you for that introduction.
Shantha Venugopal (00:48.337)
For our first question, we’ll keep it simple and ask, what was your journey to where you are today working at ATREE? A little bit about the start of your career.
Anuja Malhotra (00:59.149)
Thanks for the question. I don’t have a straightforward answer to it. I can start by saying that I really did not envision being at ATREE and doing the kind of work that I’m doing at the start of my career or when I was studying. For context, somebody who didn’t even study science after 10th grade in school and had a focus on commerce and economics and public finance is now working since about three, three and a half years now at a research institute that’s focused on conservation, ecology and environment. And I did not see myself doing that. I did not see myself working with scientists and biologists and so on when I started off. So it’s been interesting. Some of it happened as opportunities came in and I saw that conservation was something that I was deeply interested in. Some of it happened through projects and kind of one what came up after the other, I was working on some of these.
Shantha Venugopal (02:04.273)
Right, so I guess an important part of that is what is the work like today? Is it what you expected? Were there any unexpected challenges or rewards?
Anuja Malhotra (02:15.627)
So what I do now is essentially work in the science policy practice interface in India. What that essentially means is that while policymakers and practitioners work on conservation and ecosystems and conserving, restoring ecosystems, they may not always be informed by good scientific practices due to various reasons. It can be due to lack of communication, it can be due to lack of access, it can be because folks from different disciplines end up working in silos. And so what that results in now is that there is a gap in how practice and policy is implemented, and it may not always be very scientific. And so when I say that I work, in the science policy practice interface. What that means is most of my work revolves around using, communicating and understanding scientific literature, knowledge that researchers have been working on for decades. Researchers at ATREE and elsewhere have been working on this for decades. And how do we use some of that to inform policymakers and practitioners in the country? And so a lot of my work revolves around interpreting and understanding that knowledge and making it more palatable and understandable for a larger audience, which may include generalists who are practising and working around policymaking. And so that’s largely what I do. But more specifically, when you work in the development sector, it’s a wide range of things that you work on. So for example, as a sector, we need to raise our own money. We need to raise money to do projects. And so raising money, implementing projects on the ground, working with partners, working with stakeholders, all of that becomes part of our day to day. And the larger question of research, knowledge and policy communication is the high level goals that we have. So that’s kind of what I do.
Shantha Venugopal (04:39.761)
Could you also describe a little bit about ecological economics and what that entails and how it applies to your work today?
Anuja Malhotra (05:01.295)
Yeah. Right. So I studied economics, both for my bachelor’s and master’s degree. When I was doing my bachelor’s degree in economics, it was more neoclassical, conventional economics that we studied, which meant that we were still considering nature to be external from the economic systems as we know it. So if I give you an example, what it means is that…
Shantha Venugopal (05:27.856)
Right.
Anuja Malhotra (05:31.046)
We consider pollution to be an externality in an economic system. So we don’t internalise it in how we assess costs and benefits of any economic model. However, what ecological economics does is it internalises the environment being a source and a sink for the economic system. To elaborate, what that means is that all the raw materials that we are using in our economic system. So if a factory is using water, it is using minerals, it is using anything from nature, that’s when nature is acting as a source for our economic activities. And when we are pushing back pollution, waste, or any unused byproducts, the environment is acting as a sink for the economic system.
So what ecological economics tells us is that nature and environment are not external to the economic system, which means that there is a limit to how much we can grow without worrying about conservation and optimal utilisation of resources. So ecological economics is interesting because it just doesn’t put a price on nature. It doesn’t just say that…hey if you’re polluting you pay a certain amount and you get away with it. Rather, what it does is that it forces you to internalise the cost that you are incurring on the environment in your economic system itself.
Shantha Venugopal (07:09.393)
What drew you to specialise in it after you’d finished your economics degree?
Anuja Malhotra (07:15.364)
Well, when I studied the different disciplines, sub-disciplines under economics, it was very fascinating to me that the idea of putting price on nature never really made a lot of sense to me. So, for example, the concept of giving an industry a licence to pollute, which is again a very conventional way of looking at pollution in economics.
That never made sense to me. And so when I was exposed to the discipline where we were talking about society, environment, economics together, that made a lot of sense to me in the context of the real world, because that’s how it is, right? You’re not able to differentiate the environment, the society and the economy. It’s all together. So studying it separately never really made sense. So just by getting exposed to it, looking at some of the work, that folks had done was kind of enough for me to know that I’m interested in specialising in that.
Shantha Venugopal (11:08.471)
We talked about this in our previous conversations, but what was the role of mentors and other launching factors in your career?
Anuja Malhotra (11:20.287)
I think what ultimately makes up our ideologies and what we want to do has a lot to do with the environment we are in and the folks who are mentoring and teaching us. For me, right from when I was studying economics at LSR for my undergrad and then doing my masters at TERI, I was very fortunate to have some really good professors and peers who had a very important role to play in the kind of career choices I made. So for example, when you study economics at LSR, you have lots of options to get into corporate jobs and finance related, banking related, data related jobs, which pay well and are considered conventionally good career choices. But some of the courses that we had while we were studying, including in development economics, in Indian development, more specifically, where you understand that while you have an obsession in this country with growth and GDP, we tend to think that those are the things that matter. We had some really good professors who showed us alternate scenarios of what it really means in this country’s development trajectory. What kind of inequality and poverty we still have, how we are highly dependent still on natural resources and why it’s important to conserve and restore them for people more than anything. And similarly, when I was doing my masters, my thesis guide at that time, Dr. Nandan Nand, he’s the one who used to teach us ecological economics as well, and had a really big influence on wanting to take this up as a career choice for sure.
Shantha Venugopal (13:12.247)
And finally, I have to ask, and we’ve discussed this before, that you didn’t study science in school or later on in college. And it’s a common misperception that to work in the climate field, you have to have this background in science, when actually, even though you had training in economics, you deal with and work on and disseminate scientific knowledge every day. What would the childhood version of you think of what you’re doing today in your career?
Anuja Malhotra (13:39.355)
I’ll start with the second one. My childhood version would definitely be very disappointed because my childhood version was much more fun and glamorous and I wanted to be a dancer or a model or an actor and things like that. So I don’t think I’m in that domain at all. Yeah. But to your other question and the more important one about studying science, I think to work in the climate or sustainability space now, it really means that we need people from all sorts of disciplines coming together because there’s so much to do. And I often say it to people that we need more marketers, we need people who understand finance, we need people who know communications well, we need people who can come in from a creative artistic background as well because what’s really important is to take some of these complex narratives to the larger audiences that we deal with. Ultimately, the issue is that we deal in such a niche that researchers and scientists and climate professionals are usually just working and engaging with themselves in a bubble. There are very few attempts to take this out to the mainstream the way it should be, given the state of affairs and given how urgent all these issues are now. And so I really think that anybody who has an inclination towards nature, has an inclination towards conservation, has general inclination towards wildlife and forestry and our mountains and everything that is around us. They could very well think about a career in conservation because we need people from all spheres of life and most importantly we need people who can bring in an alternate viewpoint and take it out to the masses as we need to. So that’s my take on that.
I don’t think you need to study biology or ecology to be working in this field at all.
Shantha Venugopal (15:44.567)
Right. And you’ve also mentioned that day to day your work changes a lot and there are a lot of different areas that you’ve had to pick up on the fly and kind of get good at to do your job successfully. There’s all these different buckets of work. What kind of attributes do you think the next generation of climate professionals needs to encourage and grow and inculcate to be successful in this field?
Anuja Malhotra (16:07.416)
Yeah, I see for us and most of us who are in this sector now, there was no set pathway or career trajectory that you could look at, right? If you do an MBA, it’s straightforward. You do your graduation, you do an MBA, you get into a job, you’ll join as an analyst and a career path for you is very well defined the way it is now. But with the development and climate sector, A, it’s very fast growing right now and there are many initiatives and organisations that are coming up. You’re seeing companies starting sustainability wings, climate wings, CSR wings. I mean, CSR is legally mandated, but sustainability and ESG and whatnot. The point being that it’s hard to say what kind of opportunities will become more apparent as we go ahead. But the commonality in all of this is that if you’re passionate about working in the sustainability and environment field, you can always upscale and pick up the things that you need to do. So for example, I’ve picked up a lot of things on the job, which I was not necessarily trained in when I was doing my masters. I’m working in the policy centre now, but I’ve never done a formal degree in public policy as such. I’ve picked all of that up from the job. And I see that around me all the time. There are people who’ve quit 10 year-long law careers, corporate careers and joined the conservation space and so on, not with the necessary technical training but with the passion that they want to work in the field. So I think that’s the commonality that if you’re inclined and passionate to work in the field, you’ll find opportunities and you can upskill accordingly.
Shantha Venugopal (17:58.391)
Thank you. That’s actually been really helpful advice and I’m sure our listeners will benefit greatly from it. Thank you so much for agreeing to take up the time to speak with us.
Anuja Malhotra (18:07.669)
Thanks Shanta for having me..
