India board

Rati Forbes (honorary chair)

Rati is director at Forbes Marshall Ltd, which builds steam engineering and control instrumentation solutions for the process industry. She is responsible for the company’s social initiatives in community health, education and women’s issues.

Rati is a graduate in psychology and sociology and has studied human resource management at IIM Ahmedabad, and philanthropy and social entrepreneurship at Stanford University. She recently completed a master’s degree in sustainability leadership and management from Cambridge, UK.

Dr Alka Barua

Dr Alka is a paediatrician, an independent consultant and a researcher with more than 30 years of experience in the health sector. She was previously executive director at the Foundation for Research in Health System in Ahmedabad, and an advisory committee member at the Safe Abortion Advocacy Initiative.

She has a plethora of publications on many platforms and worked as a resource person at training workshops organised by NGOs, the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health and the World Health Organisation. She completed her MBBS and MD in paediatrics at Nagpur University, and also holds a PhD in sociology from Tata Institute of Social Science in Bombay.

Naheed T Carrimjee

Naheed is a solicitor and a founding partner of Desai Desai Carrimjee and Mulla, a firm specialising in corporate and civil law. Her practice areas include litigation, arbitration and dispute resolution, corporate law and capital markets, plus many others.

Naheed is a conscious environmentalist and takes keen interest in social and development issues. She is closely involved with several charitable organisations. Her alma mater includes University of Bombay Government Law College, Mount Holyoke College in the US, and London School of Economics in the UK.

Dr Hemachandran Karah

Dr Karah teaches English literature at IIT Madras, and works in the fields of disability studies and medical humanities. He is interested in researching on themes such as the language question, literary criticism and musicology, and has a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge.

Dr Karah regularly contributes to magazines and newspapers, and his literary works include a monography on the writings of Ved Mehta, and a textbook for the course on disability, society and culture at Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi. He is a member of the Society for Disability Studies in the US, and the, Disability Studies Association in the UK.