PROFILE
Amitabha Sarkar is a Research Associate at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID). He works at the intersections of human rights, international development and global health to study the determinants of development, democracy and wellbeing in planning, designing and implementation of public and social policies to withstand ecological, social, political and economic predicaments. At the Democracy Centre, he is instrumental in studying the interlinkages between democracy, development and human rights at the conceptual, theoretical and empirical levels.
Amitabha did his PhD from the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). It is on the evolution of World Bank’s institutional policy in health systems since 1975 and the changing patterns of development assistance (World Bank Group Library). He was a recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Fellow in the field of Global Public Health for the year of 2022 – 2023 at the IHEID’s Global Health Centre.
Amitabha is a recipient of several distinguished fellowships in the past, and a regular contributor for various newspapers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked with the Department of Global Health in the Peking University as a China India Visiting Scholar to prepare the South Asia Public Health Preparedness Plan. His present affiliations are with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva and Tampere University in Finland. He sits in the various public bodies of international, regional and national institutes, and serves in the WHO-Geneva’s global experts pool for Universal Health Coverage monitoring and health systems performance assessment. Amitabha travels widely, and collaborates with institutions based in Europe, Asia and North America.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8009-2739