Dr Karthik Rao-Cavale has a PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his research interests lie at the intersection of regional political economy, urban studies, economic geography, and development studies. His dissertation constructs a social history of regional road networks, regimes of circulation, and rural development in southern Tamil Nadu (1915 – 1965).

Dr Rao-Cavale holds a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. His earlier work in the field of city planning has been published in leading journals such as ‘Transportation Research Record’ and ‘Landscape and Urban Planning’. He has also contributed an empirical chapter to an edited volume on the Indian Supreme Court (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and has edited a special issue of Projections, the MIT Journal of Urban Planning.