Dr. Aditi Mukherji
India
Dr. Aditi Mukherji, a young Indian social scientist, was selected as the first recipient of The Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Mukherji was chosen to receive this award from a large number of nominees for her research on groundwater resources in agriculture which led to major policy changes benefiting thousands of farmers in West Bengal.
During her intense fieldwork surveying more than 4,000 groundwater users, Dr. Mukherji discovered that smallholder farmers in water-abundant eastern India were being prevented by certain policy restrictions from gaining access to the water resources needed to irrigate their crops. She then worked closely with the farmers and village residents to ensure that their concerns were fully recorded and that their collective voice was heard by policymakers.
Dr. Mukherji was educated at: Presidency College, Calcutta; Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; and the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. She completed a Ph.D degree in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.