About
Sunil has a PhD from University College London, University of London, and researches the urban in the Global South, with India as his primary geographical focus and, more recently, South Asia.
He has also conducted research in Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. His key urban research interests include housing; landlords and tenants; labour markets and livelihoods; rural–urban migration; migrant construction workers; and forced evictions, resettlement and livelihoods. Sunil is currently researching the discrimination faced by middle-class Muslims in Delhi’s housing markets. Grounded in a critique of urban and development scholarship, as well as policies, his research and teaching challenges base assumptions and premises, thereby inculcating a praxis of epistemic disobedience.
Sunil has undertaken two major research projects for the UK Department for International Development (DFID, now FCDO). The first, completed in 2016, is The Urbanisation-Construction-Migration Nexus in Five Cities in South Asia: Kabul, Dhaka, Chennai, Kathmandu and Lahore. A six-page briefing note and the full report are available online. His earlier DFID research project, completed in 2001, was entitled Social Relations, Rental Housing Markets and the Poor in urban India. He has published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Housing Studies and Cities. In 1987, he was the Asian Regional Coordinator for the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. He has also undertaken consultancies for DFID, the Inter-American Development Bank, UN-Habitat and the World Bank, among others.
Sunil has a keen interest in, and commitment to, the pedagogy of teaching and learning, and takes great pleasure in mentoring graduate and undergraduate students. He served as Dean of Graduate Studies from 2011 to 2017.
Together with Vanessa Hughes, Sunil designed the Race Matters initiative in the Department of Social Policy. The initiative creates spaces for students and staff to discuss ‘race’ and its significance for understanding and developing decolonised approaches to International Social and Public Policy.
Sunil is an associate of the LSE India Observatory and Chair of Appropriate Technology Asia, an NGO that works in high-altitude regions of India and Nepal.
Sunil supervises doctoral studies in areas including: Urbanisation; internal migration; informal labour markets; informal housing; housing tenure; housing discrimination; landlords and tenants; social policy and development.
Teaching
Undergraduate Courses
SP315 Urbanisation and Social Policy in the Global Souths
Postgraduate Courses