Smita Srinivas, Assistant Professor, Columbia University, Urban Planning program
Director, Technological Change Lab (TCLab)

 

Title and Abstract:

Industry and Innovation issues in the Biotech and Pharmaceutical Sectors in India

The Indian biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors are embedded in rather starkly different socio-political contexts than sectors such as the IT or service sector. This discussion will situate industry and innovation problems with specifics of technical details, within a broader institutional and political context of welfare regimes and health needs.  

Biographical sketch:

Smita Srinivas is Director of the Technological Change Lab research unit (TCLab) and Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University. Her training is in economics and economic development planning. Her research focuses on technological changes and the employment and social policy contexts of industrializing countries and city-regions. Her writings on economic planning and policy focus on institutional theories of local and economy-wide change and particularly on the State's role in accommodating industrial and social policy concerns alongside.

Prof. Srinivas has been involved with research and advisory work for over a decade between and alongside her academic involvements. In 2004, the government of India National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) invited her to join the Commission's efforts as a member/consultant on issues of social protection, technology and training. This and other invitations that she has been unable to accept have included a 2007 invitation from the Inter-Parliamentary Union to address parliamentarians in Geneva on the issue of women's employment and social protections.

Her research and invited advisory work has included numerous international, national and grass-roots organizations. Some of these are the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Aga Khan Development network, the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), United Nations agencies including UNIDO, the international network WIEGO on women and informal employment, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). Prof. Srinivas has been an invited speaker at several international venues including the International Labor Organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, UNESCO, and at multiple universities for invited seminars and conference panels. She has also been a speaker at a 2007 NSF-sponsored policy workshop on Science and Technology in the New Global Economy at the National Academes of Sciences, and an invitee to a University of Pennsylvania-Brandeis University, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored workshop in 2007 as a member of the Indian diaspora and working towards Indian health policy reforms.

Prof. Srinivas is primary author and co-author of Learning from experience: A gendered approach to social protection for workers in the informal economy (Geneva: ILO 2000/2005 with Frances Lund), and Women Organizing for social protection, The Self-employed Women's Association's Integrated Insurance Scheme, India (Geneva: International Labour Office, STEP Programme, 2001). Lund and Srinivas (2000 WIEGO/ILO), was subsequently reprinted in 2005, a "best-seller", according to the ILO.