Collective organisation as crisis infrastructure: Evidence from the Self-Employed Women’s Association during COVID-19 in India
Join the Department of Global Health and Population for this Brown Bag Seminar featuring Satchit Balsari, associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Kartikeya Bhatotia, Climate Fellow at the Mittal South Asia Institute, Harvard University.
Seminar description
When public health crises hit, governments, individuals, and markets each have a role in smoothing out the resulting shocks. In poorer contexts, each one’s capacity to do so is limited—public safety nets are thin, individual savings are shallow or absent, and financial markets are not far-reaching enough to provide protection to the most vulnerable. How, then, could we imagine institutions that fill this gap? The SEWA-Harvard Study asks whether long-standing community organisations can serve as a kind of crisis infrastructure. The findings suggest that collective organisation and relational trust among informal workers should be treated as genuine social protection infrastructure—a durable complement to state and market capacity, with relevance well beyond India wherever large informal workforces sit outside formal systems.
Speaker bios
Satchit Balsari’s research and teaching are focused on complex humanitarian emergencies and digital health implementation science in resource-poor settings. He has worked with populations affected by war and disasters across the world, and in the most vulnerable communities, his team has leveraged cutting-edge digital tools and citizen science to advance public health planning, advocacy, and response. Satchit co-directs CrisisReady.io, a research-response platform that builds data-driven decision tools for local communities and response agencies affected by disasters globally. He is founding director of the tri-institute Climate and Human Health fellowship at Harvard, leads the climate platform at the Mittal South Asia Institute, and is co-investigator on the Salata Institute’s inaugural interfaculty cluster grant on Climate Adaptation in South Asia. He directs the Harvard India Digital Health Network at the Mittal South Asia Institute and is the curator of Hum Sab Ek, an immersive multimedia traveling exhibition currently on tour. The exhibition is based on his research into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2.9 million members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and their response to the crisis.
Kartikeya Bhatotia is a Climate Fellow at the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University, where he works on research and programming for the Climate Platform. His work brings environmental, health, and social science research into conversation with public policy. He is particularly interested in how informal social systems shape community responses to slow-onset environmental hazards and how collective institutions support health and livelihoods in the Global South. At Harvard, he has contributed to the Salata Institute’s Climate Adaptation in South Asia research cluster and the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Heat and Worker Protections Scholarly Working Group. Before Harvard, Kartikeya worked at Tata Trusts and the Institute for Financial Management and Research, applying behavioral economics to health, climate, and economic development in informal contexts. He was a 2018 Young India Fellow at Ashoka University and earned a master’s degree in public policy form Harvard Kennedy School in 2024.
Speaker Information
Kartikeya Bhatotia
Organizers
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