Neera Burra

Neera Burra is Assistant Resident Representative and Senior Social Development Adviser at the Sustainable Energy and Environment Division (SEED) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), India Office, New Delhi. A sociologist by taining, she obtained her Ph.D. from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has previously been with the International Labour Organization (ILO) as National Expert in its women’s programme (1988–93) and with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) as Programme Manager for South Asia (1993–95). Dr Burra has been closely involved with NGOs and CBOs working on micro-credit and women’s empowerment for the last 15 years. She has also worked extensively on the issues of child labour and education and was recently awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Globalization and Human Rights Programmes of the University of Chicago to study the impact of globalization on child labour.

Dr Burra’s current interests are in natural resource management for poverty eradication with a strong thrust on micro-credit, women’s empowerment and poverty eradication. She has published extensively in the field of child labour, and has also written on watershed development, women’s empowerment and micro-credit.