About Me
Senior Professor (ret.), TISS Mumbai; founded the Disaster Management centre that became the Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies; led India’s first Master’s in Disaster Management; works across gender, vulnerability and risk-informed planning; advisor to NDMA & defence HADR; continues to write, teach and consult.
Milestones
1994–2006 Head, URCD (TISS)
2006 Founded Disaster Management Centre (seeded by Jamsetji Tata Trust)
2011–12 IFRC online certificate (participants from 104+ countries)
2025 Retired; visiting faculty & research
Awards
1990-93: Awarded the Association of Commonwealth Universities Scholarship in the year 1990-93 to pursue her doctoral studies from School of Environment Sciences, University of East Anglia, U.K. in the area of Gender, Development and Environment.
2014: Professor Andharia was accorded the “Best Professor in Disaster Management Award”, by National Education Leadership Awards, of Lokmat, at a function held at Taj Lands End, Bandra, Mumbai.
2014: was awarded The Bellagio Center Residency, where she was invited to apply in 2013. For over six decades this programme is promoted as a means for exceptional individuals to unlock their creativity and advance ground breaking work.
2015: Recipient of an award for outstanding contribution to education at the World Education Congress Global Awards for Excellence in Education, Leadership and Teaching on 23rd July, 2015 at Mumbai.
Policy
Prominent among her policy engagements at the national level are her membership to the Group on Women workers and Child labour, IIIrd National Commission on Labour, Government of India (2000), The Swaminathan Committee on Coastal Regulation Zone (2004), and the Committee Reviewing the Tribal Sub-Plan in Maharashtra (2015), among others. She has been invited as an expert to serve on several of the National Disaster Management Authority’s (NDMA) sectoral committees constituted to develop policy guidelines. She was a member of the Working Group on Disaster Management for the 12th Five Year Plan (GOI). She is regularly invited to deliver a lecture on Humanitarian Action and Disaster Relief (HADR) at the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington and within various higher command courses of the armed forces. More recently she was invited to chair a session on HADR at the high-level multilateral meeting hosted by India, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
