Our Team
Yukti Choudhary
Director
Yukti has a degree in history and law from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi and Harvard Law School. She has more than nine years of progressive work experience in business and human rights. She has worked on Mining Regulation, Climate Change, conducting Human Rights Due Diligence, Corporate Social Responsibility, Stakeholder Mapping and Community Engagement. She has worked with government institutions, civil society organisations and private entities. She has previously worked with Indian Institute for Corporate Affairs (Manesar), i-Forest (New Delhi), Centre for Science and Environment (New Delhi), Centre for Responsible Business (New Delhi) and Context Consulting (London). She has been a constitutionally-elected member of the Zila Parishad from Fatehabad, Haryana for five years. She contributed to the first Business Responsibility Reporting framework developed by the Government of India and was one of the project’s lead researchers on labour rights. She conducted one of the pioneer human rights due diligence for a multinational in India. She has worked as a Senior Associate for a UNICEF-funded project on Gendered analysis of the Reporting Requirements of businesses in India. She has authored a Report on the Just Transition of Thermal Power Plants where gaps in the existing legal structure were identified and recommendations made accordingly. She was involved in developing a self-assessment tool for the garment sector in Indian export houses. She authored a Toolkit for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which explored the changes in labour laws in India. She has conducted trainings on Forced Labour and human trafficking. She has undertaken research to identify how Indian multinational firms work with, challenge and modify global labour and social standards within the global value chains. She contributed to the drafting of the District Mineral Foundation (DMF) Model Rules for particular states of India after rigorous consultation with Government representatives. These were subsequently adopted by many states in India. She currently serves as an Associate with the Centre for Responsible Business, New Delhi.
Ritu Priya has done her LLB from Delhi University and LLM degree from London School of Economics with specialization in International Human rights law. She has more than five years of experience working in the field of gender and rule of law. She has specialised knowledge at analysing businesses through a gender perspective. She focuses on assessing the impact of trade, investment and tax on women. At the same time, she assesses businesses in their role in empowering women, both economically and socially. She has previously worked with the Government of Afghanistan and carried out organizational assessment of Attorney General Office of Afghanistan. Currently she coordinates gender sensitization training session for prosecutors , judges and police with the help of grassroot NGOs.
Ritu Priya
Consultant
Prof. Dr. Josephine van Zeben is Chair of the Law Group at Wageningen University and Research. She has written extensively on European, American and international environmental law as well as on constitutional and administrative law. She is particularly interested in the interaction between local, regional and international governance, and the position of private actors and civil society organisations in the regulation of complex questions such as climate change. Her work aims to incorporate lessons learned from other disciplines, such as the life sciences, into the legal system. Before coming to Wageningen, she was a Tutorial Fellow (associate professor) at Worcester College (University of Oxford) for five years, specialising in EU law, UK constitutional and administrative law. She also spent several fellowships at the Ostrom Workshop in Indiana, Harvard Law School, and New York University as a Hauser Global Scholar.
Josephine Van Zeben
Advisor
Nadia Bernaz is Associate Professor of Law at Wageningen University (the Netherlands), and Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Lille (France). She holds a PhD in international law from Aix-Marseille University (France). She has been teaching business and human rights since 2010, and is on the managing committee of the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum, an organization with more than 300 members teaching business and human rights at over 150 institutions in 40 countries. Dr Bernaz is the author of Business and Human Rights. History, Law and Policy (Routledge, 2017) and has published her research in Human Rights Quarterly, the Journal of Business Ethics, Business and Society, and the Business and Human Rights Journal. She founded and runs Rights as Usual, a blog dedicated to business and human rights, and is on Twitter @NadiaBernaz.
Nadia Bernaz
Advisor
Praveena Mahala has pursued an M.Phil. in Development Practice at Ambedkar University. Following her interest, she has been engaged in community work across tribal spaces. She is particularly interested in working with tribal communities of Central India across questions of development and ecology. Her formative training has been from Miranda House where she studied Economics followed by M.A. in Development Studies at Ambedkar University. At present, she is working on a Project based in Uttar Bastar Kanker which delves into the relationship of tribal communities with forest land, in the social, economic, and traditional context. Alongside this, she is also exploring the issues pertaining to Human Rights and the local communities' access to legislative provisions under PESA (1996) and FRA (2006).
Praveena Mahala
Consultant
Hafsa is a Ph.D Scholar at IIT Bombay. She has completed her M.Phil from TISS, Mumbai and her M.Sc Economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune. She has a B.A Honours in Economics from University of Delhi. She has previously worked with Prof. Jean Dreze in Jharkhand, and her inspiration for working in rural India stems from that. She has extensive field work experience, and her recent project was TISS-Chatra. She worked closely with the District Magistrate Office in regard with the developmental scope of the aspirational district. She displays outstanding skills at understanding economic and administrative requirements of rural areas.