K. Narayanan
Prof. Krishnan Narayanan is a distinguished economist and faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he serves as a professor and Head of the Department of Economics. He also serves as Honorary Secretary of the Forum for Global Knowledge Sharing. His key research areas include development economics, energy and industrial economics, international business, industry-environmental linkages, and climate change.
Project Brief:
Access to formal finance remains uneven for many self-employed and micro-enterprises operating in India’s urban informal and semi-formal sectors, particularly within creative industries that rely primarily on individual skills and intellectual capital. Despite the expansion of financial inclusion initiatives and government-supported credit schemes, creative entrepreneurs often face procedural complexities, documentation gaps, and institutional barriers that limit their ability to secure formal loans. This project examines how education and skill development intersect with access to institutional credit in shaping enterprise sustainability and growth. Specifically, the study seeks to: i) examine the extent and patterns of formal sector credit access among self-employed creative workers; ii) assess how existing lending mechanisms and public credit schemes function in practice for these enterprises; and iii) identify key institutional constraints and propose practical, evidence-based measures to strengthen financial linkages within the creative economy.
Radeef Chundakkadan
Chundakkadan’s recent research focuses on firm innovation and technology adoption, corporate finance, and the economics of gender. His work has been published in leading international journals, including Industrial and Corporate Change, World Development, Small Business Economics, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Economic Modelling, Global Finance Journal, and International Journal of Finance and Economics. His research is widely cited, with over 100 citations in publications related to innovation.
He is the recipient of the MJ Manohar Rao Award from The Indian Econometrics Society (TIES) and the C1973 Research Excellence Award from IIT Bombay. His work has also been presented at prominent international conferences organized by the World Bank Group, Globelics, and the Forum for Global Knowledge Sharing.
Chundakkadan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He earned his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Project Description:
Financial constraints are a pressing issue for many business activities. A certain set of firms faces greater hurdles in accessing external funds. One such firm is a female-owned or -managed firm due to gender discrimination in the credit market. As a result, such firms register poor performance, productivity and innovation. The current study extends this strand of literature by exploring whether the obstacle to external funds suppresses environmentally friendly practices of female enterprises. Governments around the world have introduced several policies and regulations to curb environmental degradation. As part of this, governments incentives firms to begin monitoring their carbon footprints. However, such compliance often requires an initial investment, and financial constraints may be an obstacle to it. This obstacle will be ever severe on female-owned or managed firms due to gender discrimination in the credit market. Given that the objective of this study is three-fold: i) To study the nexus between the gender of the owner and carbon monitoring of the firms; ii) To study the role of access to external funds in carbon monitoring; iii) To investigate the relationship between gender equality and carbon monitoring of female-owned firms.
Chethan Kamath
Chethan Kamath is an assistant professor at the CSE department at IIT Bombay, where he is a member of the Theory Group and Trust Lab. While his primary area of research is cryptography, his interests extend beyond to computational complexity theory and theoretical computer science.
Arjun Bhagoji
Arjun is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science at IIT Bombay. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2020 and a Dual Degree (B.Tech.+M.Tech) at IIT Madras in 2015, both in Electrical Engineering. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on making machine learning systems more robust and reliable, particularly for socially relevant applications. His work lies at the intersection of security and machine learning. Arjun's research has been recognized with a Spotlight at the NeurIPS 2023 conference, the Siemens FutureMakers Fellowship in Machine Learning (2018-2019) and the 2018 SEAS Award for Excellence at Princeton University. He was a Rising Star in Data Science in 2021, a finalist for the 2020 Bede Liu Best Dissertation Award in Princeton's ECE Department and a finalist for the 2017 Bell Labs Prize.
Project Description:
The growing amount of AI-generated content available online requires techniques such as watermarking to ensure that misinformation and fraud can be combated. However, existing schemes are only effective in the API or closed-source setting where watermarking can be enforced. We propose a study of the formal limits of watermarking in the open-source setting.
This project will:
1) Identify and formalize the setting in a manner that aligns with both the practice of machine learning as well as appropriate threat models,
2) Provide constructions from first principles of open-source watermarking schemes
3) Determine conditions under which watermarking of open-source is impossible.
Addressing these key research questions will enable both practitioners and researchers deploy powerful generative models safely.