Divya Ravindranath studies informal work, social protection, gender and urban health. She has worked with several not-for-profit organisations in urban and rural India, where most of her work focussed on issues of common pool resources, urban infrastructure and livelihoods. Divya has also been a visiting faculty at CEPT, Ahmedabad, where she taught qualitative research methods to postgraduate and doctoral students.
Her doctoral work focussed on child undernutrition and maternal access to healthcare services and government programmes among migrant households engaged in construction work. Building on this, her work at IIHS examines how women in the informal economy experience the mother-worker conundrum as they seek to balance paid work and childcare in the absence of any form of maternity benefits. Her ongoing project looks at time-use and breastfeeding practices at informal work sites.
Divya teaches advanced ethnographic methods and co-teaches urban health in the elective term, as faculty at the IIHS Urban Fellows Programme.