Dr. R. Parthasarathy is a Visiting Professor at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, Uttarakhand. He has a PhD in Economics from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. Till January 2023, he was the Director and Professor at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad. He was earlier a Professor at the Faculty of Planning, and Dean Faculty of Rural Planning at the CEPT University, Ahmedabad where he taught Natural Resource Management and Environmental Economics to Postgraduate and Graduate students, besides guiding Masters and PhD dissertations.
His research interests are natural resource management, environmental economics and urban planning. He has undertaken many studies relating to large-scale irrigation, river basins, water management, fisheries, mangroves, and the coastal cities. He has been focusing on the social distributions of power, leadership, economic development and the impacts of policy and development organizations in these sectors with special focus on the interventions by governments and NGOs both at policy and at the level of implementation.
Until recently, he was leading the MEGA Centre at GIDR as MEGA Chair Professor that worked closely with the Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation in the setting up of Metro Rail in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. He has coordinated a network of researchers and organizations involved in the process research on participatory irrigation management programs in various states in India and Nepal for over five years. He was also actively involved in the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA). His collaborative work includes both Indian and overseas universities and institutions like IWMI. Besides serving as a consultant to ADB, DFID, London and the Centre for Development Studies, University of Wales, U.K, he has also served as a member in a number of Governmental committees. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley with a World Bank aided post-doctoral research fellowship in Environmental Economics. As a Shastri Faculty Research Fellow, he has collaborated with the Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway, Institute of Philippine Culture, Manila and IWMI, Colombo. He has co-authored and co-edited books and has published research papers extensively.