Madhav Pai

Chief Executive Officer - WRI India

Madhav Pai is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of WRI India. He spearheads a large urbanization policy research and prototyping support program that informs key areas of India’s urban growth story. For the last two decades, Madhav has led, designed, and implemented urban programs and projects, across continents, in over a dozen countries.

  • Madhav is a systems thinker and combines his academic training in engineering and transport planning, with his acumen to find systemic solutions to complex and wicked urban problems. India’s urbanization challenges are the key research focus of Madhav’s exploration. He joined WRI India in 2008 and has pioneered several new, and innovative methods to overcome barriers to implementation of environmentally and financially sustainable infrastructure.

    Madhav has mentored senior researchers at WRI India, in building sustainable, low carbon and resilient prototypes for Indian cities which can be further scaled across the country. He has led several projects around emerging urbanism ideas such as the use of tactical urbanism and public campaigns around pedestrian/social infrastructure, geospatial and other big data analytics to create data driven conversations and innovation challenges/competitions to address service delivery challenges. Notable successes include project design and implementation of Indore BRT, Mumbai Street Lab, the Raahgiri campaign for democratizing public streets, and solution design for last-mile connectivity, clean tech, etc.

    Under his leadership, the team has also informed several policy discussions, at the national-, state-, and city-level, on road safety, urban transport, transit-oriented development, electric mobility, urban and regional planning and clean air. Today, WRI India Ross Center engages 100+ professionals in offices across India and supports over 50 Indian cities.

    Madhav is a published author and has written several research papers for renowned journals, articles, and books on urban transport, urban planning, resilience, and clean air. He is a civil engineer from Mumbai and holds a master’s in Transport Planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

    Madhav lives in Mumbai with his wife Chaya and their daughter Ahilya. He is often seen bicycling with Ahilya on the streets of Mumbai. He is a believer in public transport, loves green open spaces and credits his interest in urban planning to the constant loss of playgrounds, to buildings, that he witnessed growing up, and his regular commutes on Mumbai’s suburban trains.

Contact:Madhav.Pai@wri.org

Languages: English, Hindi, and Marathi

Country of focus for project: India

Link to primary bio: https://www.wri-india.org/profile/madhav-pai

  

WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities

WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities is World Resources Institute’s program dedicated to shaping a future where cities work better for everyone. It enables more connected, compact and coordinated cities. The Center expands the transport and urban development expertise of the EMBARQ network to catalyze innovative solutions in other sectors, including air quality, water, buildings, land use and energy. It combines the research excellence of WRI with two decades of on-the-ground impact through a network of more than 320 experts working from Brazil, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Turkey and the United States to make cities around the world better places to live. More information at www.wrirosscities.org.

http://wrirosscities.org
Previous
Previous

Yuzi Zhao

Next
Next

Pawan Mulukutla