Sheetal Somashekar Patil

Sheetal Somashekar Patil worked as Research Associate and Senior Research Associate at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) for 11 years and later as a faculty member at Azim Premji University for nine years before joining IIHS.

Sheetal’s domain of research, practice and teaching at the IIHS School of Environment and Sustainability is focused on integrated agri-food systems, especially on urban and peri-urban food systems, food and ecosystems service, climate change adaptation and urban sustainability. She contributes to the IIHS Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO) through research and practice that involves integration of food-water-ecology dimensions, linking urbanisation, sustainable development, urban agriculture and food systems, and urban nature-based solutions. She has been collaborating with IIHS in the recent past on urban food gardens and urban agriculture.

With academic training in economics and field experiences in agri-food systems, agro-ecology and sustainability have formed a pivot of her research and teaching over the past two decades. The book that she co-authored in 2019, ‘Agrarian change and urbanization in Southern India: City and the Peasant’, unpacks the agro-ecological impacts of urbanisation with an attempt to unravel the complex maze and diversity amidst a notable persistence of small farms, which are large in number, yet invisible in Indian agriculture.

Sheetal spends her leisure time either with trees or experimenting with food in her kitchen.