Prof. Sachin Chaturvedi is Director General at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a New Delhi-based autonomous Think-Tank. He was also a Global Justice Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International Affairs at Yale University. He works on issues related to development cooperation policies and South-South cooperation. He has also worked on trade and innovation linkages with special focus on the World Trade Organization (WTO). Dr. Chaturvedi has served as a Visiting Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and has also worked as consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, World Bank, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP), UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Commonwealth Secretariat, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and to the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology and the Ministry of Environment and Forests, among other organisations.
India’s development cooperation policy is the reflection of the broad principles followed by the Indian foreign policy of sovereign equality and a belief in friendly relations with all countries. In particular this means a new emphasis on the ‘Neighbourhood First’ approach by Prime Minister Modi’s administration, which in last four years has seen more of the lines of credit (LoC) (concessional financing) in the neighbourhood than ever before.