Abhigya is a doctoral candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her research lies at the intersection of Public Policy and Science and Technology Studies. It draws upon theories of co-production of risk, uncertainty and ambivalence, controversy studies, and law-science interactions in regulation. Her doctoral thesis looks at the diverse understandings of health and environmental risks associated with the use of agricultural pesticides in paddy cultivation in North India.

She completed her master’s degree in Development Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. Her Master’s project looked at the social shaping of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the context of agriculture. The dissertation interrogates the very processes of knowledge production that underpin the work of agricultural research institutes and extension services.

In addition to research in public policy, she is a contributing editor with a blog named Platypus. She likes to write on a gamut of issues related to the history and anthropology of science, technology, and computing.

As a Fulbright scholar with the program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, she is working towards understanding the role of Scientific Advisory Committees constituted to review the health effects of pesticides by the Government of India. Through this, she is looking at larger questions of how scientific knowledge is produced, contested, and legitimized in regulatory policy processes. She hopes to gain cross-cutting insights specific to American societies and forms of governance to impart a comparative bend to her research which tries to comprehend the perceptions around technology and social change in the Indian agricultural scenario.