Sanjay Upadhyay (Member since 2004), Advocate, Supreme Court of India, is the founder and managing partner of the India’s first environmental law firm, Enviro Legal Defence Firm. He also established the charitable arm of the Law firm through the Environment Law and Development Foundation. Sanjay has been practicing environment and development law since 1993. An India Visiting Fellow at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley (Fall 1996) and a legal intern to the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund, San Francisco, he started his professional career at the World Wide Fund for Nature– India at the Centre for Environmental Law. Sanjay has served as an environmental and development law expert to most well-known international, multilateral, national and state Institutions including World Bank, IUCN, FAO of United Nations, UNDP, AFD, DFID, ILO, SDC, IC, IIED, ODI, WWF, Green Peace, HBF, TERI, WINROCK, MOEF, MOPR, MOTA, MNRE, IIFM, ICFRE, IEG, WII, IIPA, NIRD, University of Cambridge, Duke University to name a few. He has been part of Drafting Committees of several forest, wildlife and biodiversity related legislations both at the national and state level.

Bhaskar Vira’s research interests span the fields of political economy, development studies and environmental studies, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is particularly interested in natural resource use and management (especially forests) at a variety of scales, and state-society interactions over institutions and institutional change, and has published extensively in these areas. Over his time at Cambridge, he has co-ordinated research grants in excess of £350,000 from a number of external funding sources, including the Wellcome Trust, Nuffield Foundation and the Department for International Development (DFID). He was a co-ordinating lead author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and is one of two international advisors to a major DFID-funded research initiative undertaken by the International Institute for Environment and Development exploring markets for watershed protection services. Present appointment: University Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. Fellow, Director of Studies and Graduate Tutor, Fitzwilliam College.

A well-known pathologist, he is known for his numerous medico-socio contributions in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He also brings in the laypersons perspective and guides us to the real field based needs in the enviro-legal sector.