Dr. Ajay Gautam is an interdisciplinary scholar of public policy, governance, and development, with an MPhil and PhD in Law and Governance from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Before joining Kautilya, Dr. Gautam was a Tata Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics, where he led a project titled The Political Economy of Urban Land Grabbing in India. The research explored how governance structures and power relations shape urbanisation and deepen social inequality.Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), where he examined the intersection of politics, regional development, and the planning of mega-urban projects.

Dr. Gautam’s broader research critically engages with the socio-political and spatial processes driving urban transformation in India. He is particularly interested in how configurations of urban and rural governance—and divergent planning regimes—produce fragmented, contested and exclusionary development outcomes.His work is geographically anchored in peri-urban India, especially the Delhi NCR, which he uses as a critical site to generate theoretical insights for global debates in urban studies, political economy, and social policy.