Ananya Rao is a second-year Master of Environmental Science candidate at Yale School of the Environment. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from Ashoka University, India. Before matriculating at Yale, she worked as a researcher at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and WELL Labs. Her projects include the implementation of community forest resource rights and augmenting forest-based livelihoods in Central India, and restoration of degraded agricultural and common land in Southern India. Her areas of interest are indigenous forest rights, agrarian change, and the use and governance of natural resources. At Yale, her thesis focuses on how patterns of forest governance influence Indigenous communities’ access to land and resource rights in Southern India.
