Saranya is a PhD student at the Centre for Chinese and South-East Asian Studies (CCSEAS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She has completed her B.A. (Hons) in Chinese & M.A. in Chinese from the CCSEAS, JNU. She was awarded the Confucius Institute Scholarship to pursue a Diploma in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages at Tianjin University, China (2019-2020). She was awarded a JRF in Chinese by the UGC in 2022. Her research interests include the Communist Party of China, science & technology policies, geopolitics of technology as well as other aspects of public policy. She has previously worked at All India Radio, the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology of Observer Research Foundation and the Centre for Contemporary China Studies. Her doctoral research aims to study the CPC's quest to balance AI's progress and governance. She will pursue research at Tsinghua University during the 2026-2027 academic year.
Devahuti Sarkar is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi. Her research interests lie at the intersection of agricultural policy, political economy, and climate change. Her MPhil thesis, Agriculture, Politics and Climate Change: Exploring Interventions Across India, laid the groundwork for her subsequent inquiry into agricultural knowledge production in China. Her doctoral research undertakes a comparative study of the political economy of community agricultural practices in India and China. Devahuti presented her paper, Agroecological Practices as a Response to the Climate Crisis: Comparing Pathways of India and China, at the All India Conference of China Studies (2025). Alongside her academic work, she brings two years of ethnographic fieldwork experience with LibTech India among Adivasi communities of Jharkhand and Odisha. Her policy recommendations have been cited and endorsed by the Madras High Court in its verdict in Pushpam vs UIDAI (2025).
She is currently placed as an exchange student at East China Normal University in Shanghai, where she will be studying the Standard Chinese Language Program (One year).
