Alka Palrecha is a Humphrey Fellow from India at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT during the 2017-2018 academic year. She has founded “People in Centre” at Ahmadabad, India, which is a consulting service organization engaged in developmental works throughout India in partnerships with non-profits and governments. She works with urban and rural communities for community-based management of water resources and services for the last two decades. Some of the issues she worked include coastal salinity mitigation, wastewater reuse, drinking water provision and quality and irrigation management. She holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and is pursuing her doctoral studies at the CEPT University, Ahmadabad in Urban and Regional Planning.
Palrecha is currently interested in policies and institutional processes for the safe reuse of urban wastewater for agriculture in peri-urban India. She has carried out studies in five states in India and made a film “Wastewater Bazaar” in partnership with the IWMI TATA program. As a Research Affiliate at SAI, she will focus her research on addressing public health concerns of consumption of wastewater-grown food and contact with domestic wastewater during farming.
