New faculty member Meera Mahadevan is searching for ways to help developing countries access the resources they need — without hurting the planet
Talking to Meera Mahadevan, one of the newest professors at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), one gets the sense that the beginning of the academic year cannot come soon enough. When she is describing her work, hardly a minute goes by in which she doesn’t drop a captivating insight — the kind of elegant explanation that makes research findings seem intuitive, even though they’re anything but.
These nuggets of economic wisdom come from Mahadevan’s research on “institutional frictions,” as she calls them: the inefficiencies that make it difficult for people in developing countries to access crucial resources, like water and electricity.
“In California, people talk about whether they should get solar panels for their houses, and if they’ll get a tax subsidy for that,” she said. “But in developing countries, we’re in a totally different universe, where a lot of people don’t even have access to basic electricity.”
Particularly, she is interested in figuring out the best way, from an economic point of view, to get these resources to more people, while still doing so in a way that avoids adding another log to the climate change fire.
She focuses most of her research on India, where she grew up and received her undergraduate education, and that geographical interest is something that she’s looking forward to incorporating into her teaching.
This academic year, she’ll be teaching a course on decision theory, and she’s already thought of the examples from her research on India she wants to use to illustrate the course’s topics. For instance, she talked about how, when farmers are given free electricity, the result is that access to water becomes more unequal. Farmers leave their irrigation pumps on without concern for cost; they then sell the excess water to wealthy populations who are willing to hand over cash for the extra supply — while the poorest people are left without anything beyond their small rations, scarcely a bucket a day.
“Pretend I’m a social planner and I’m looking at this situation,” she said. “What would I do to try and fix it? How do I maximize the net welfare of this microcosm of society? That’s decision theory, and those are the kinds of questions I want to get students to ask.”
Before joining GPS, Mahadevan got her bachelor’s degree at Delhi University in India, and she proceeded to receive a master’s degree from Oxford. After that, she hopped over the pond to work at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The economic research she was doing there spurred her to go for a doctorate, and she went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.
She said that her previous experience working in economics departments allowed her to grow as an economist by giving her an appreciation of the perspectives of others in the field. But she said that at GPS, she’s eager for her studies to make their way outside of the academy and into the world.
“I’m excited to write more popular pieces for the press,” she said. “I’m excited about working with students who are going to go on to work in policy, in think tanks, in government. And I’m excited about working with the 21st Century India Center, because there is a real opportunity to have it serve as a front for us to work with governments on policy recommendations.”
Outside the classroom
In her research, Mahadevan has found that when women are elected to political office in India, air pollution decreases by nearly 13%. One possible reason for this phenomenon, she said, is that women are still held primarily responsible for caring for children — so when they hold office, they have a vested interest in enacting policies that promote a healthy environment for their youths.
Similarly, Mahadevan wants to raise awareness in a university setting about the unique challenges that women in academia — and working women generally — confront as they juggle their careers with child-rearing duties.
“I feel like I knew more about how to fix plumbing issues in my house than I did about actually giving birth and raising a kid,” she said. “It’s so crazy that as a society, we just don’t talk a lot about that.”
Now, she is trying to be more transparent about the obligations that attend motherhood — like fitting in time to pump amid a busy day of meetings, or picking up the kids from daycare without being late to a lecture — so that the taboo can be lifted.
“I almost prefer to err on the side of talking about this kind of stuff too much because I need people to understand just how much of a cognitive load it is,” she said.
But even while managing two young children and a full-time academic career, Mahadevan said that she and her husband, GPS professor Gaurav Khanna, have promised themselves to keep up traveling, a pastime they have always loved.
And closer to home, she has come to enjoy exploring the San Diego area’s natural landscape.
“California has been very different from the places I grew up in, which are very densely populated urban centers in India,” she said. “So I’ve slowly grown into a more outdoorsy sort of lifestyle, including hikes and walks along the beach.”
When she’s not out and about, Mahadevan likes to focus on creative endeavors: drawing and painting, as well as doing craft work.
Speaking over a video call, she motioned to the scene behind her: “I’ve blurred my background only because there are two boxes of art supplies piled on top of each other.”
