Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Professor and Fellow, Oxford University. For four decades prior to her retirement in 2011, her academic focus was on development economics and agrarian political economy, mostly through fieldwork in and around India. She was instrumental in co-founding the Oxford Department of International Development and the university’s Contemporary South Asia Programme in Area Studies. She has served on research advisory committees for the British and the French governments and advised 7 UN agencies. Since 2011, Dr. Harriss-White remains busy, mainly working on the economy as a waste-producing system. Her interests involve rural markets and commercial capital, deprivation and markets, and the ground realities of public policies in these areas. Her decades-long scholarly focus on India and South Asia started with her fieldwork during the Green Revolution. Her publications include A Political Economy of Agricultural Markets in South India (1996), India Working – Essays on Society and Economy (2004), and Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (2014). In 2013 she was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Highlights of her career and publications can be accessed at https://www.barbarahw.in.