Bhaskar Vira is an economist, researcher and educator who has been the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Cambridge since last year and has recently added responsibility for 'Environmental Sustainability' to his portfolio.
An economist who led the University’s Department of Geography from 2019-22, Bhaskar came to academia with a deep understanding of humanity’s impact on nature after a childhood in the panoramic foothills of the Himalayas and dense jungles of central India.
“I think some of my early influences showed that the natural world was important to us but also very fragile and that we had to do something to protect it,” he said.
As a boy, Bhaskar watched a mining operation strip bare the bucolic hillside above his school and awoke to climate change as the burning issue of his teens. Then, as an undergraduate, he read the UN’s ground-breaking 1987 Brundtland report, which set out humanity’s plight in stark terms.
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“I've spent a lot of my career thinking about how to convert that instinctive commitment to nature into something that is meaningful in terms of my own work.”
Bhaskar’s work has always ranged across academic disciplines in an effort to strive for impact, whether it’s on nature, in education curriculum, public policy or community outreach. He places a lot of stock in the collegiate structure, having been an undergraduate and doctorate at St. John’s, and now a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College.
In 2019-20, he helped to create Pani Pahar – the Water Curriculum, a curriculum resource that was based on a UKRI-funded research project on water security in the Indian Himalayas. The resource is now being used to deliver a central education platform within a programme of tree plantation drives, waste management and recycling that engages students, communities, village councils and towns in the north-eastern Indian state of Nagaland.
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Currently, alongside his leadership and teaching roles at Cambridge, he continues to retain his commitment to using scholarship to inform policy and public debate. Having previously curated a photo exhibition as part of the Pani Pahar project, he has just started working on a Discovery Channel series on the environmental challenges facing India.
