Pranandita Biswas

Pranandita Biswas

Physicist turned economist. Interested in all things data and policy.

Research

Investigating the root of inflation in Sri Lanka–Money supply or exchange rate?

In 2022, Sri Lanka faced a severe financial crisis coupled with high inflation that peaked at 70% year-over-year. While the dominant public discourse blames governments ‘printing too much money’ as the cause for inflation, monetary expansion is not the only way to explain uncontrolled price rises. This project examines the Sri Lankan case through two antagonistic theoretical explanations of inflation using quantitative data, political economy analysis, and econometric tools.

Conservation why? A political ecology investigation of wildlife laws in India

In 2022, a three decade-old bird sanctuary in central India was de-notified by the national government as the project had failed—all the birds were dead, and local communities were unhappy at losing land rights when the sanctuary was declared. Such conflict over land, a common theme across conservation projects in independent India, can be traced to an ideological stance that conservation requires exclusion of humans to protect nature, with the marginalized being the easiest to exclude. This project aims to understand the ideological basis of Indian conservation laws, particularly the Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972, and their implications for policy and social justice.