Evita is a Delhi-based urban researcher and practitioner. Her earlier research primarily focused on land, housing, and caste dynamics in Indian cities. Her work sought to make sense of a glorified yet unjust past and present through a critical lens shaped by caste.
She is actively engaged in social movements and membership-based fora, and serves as Joint Secretary of the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD). She also works closely with natural resource-based communities and heads the People’s Commission and Public Inquiry Committees examining post-pandemic shifts in governance, labour, land, and livelihoods through ground-based research, community mobilisation and documentation.
Evita’s writing has appeared in The Hindu, Frontline, Scroll, The Wire, NewsClick, and Newslaundry, where she has written on caste, labour, housing, and urban life. She is also the co-author of “Demolition City: Planning Violations and the Erosion of Housing Rights,” published in City Limits: The Crisis of Urbanisation, Penguin India, 2024.
More recently, Evita’s writings have brought a critical caste lens to fisheries and fisherpeople based research. In a unique manner she has examined how most marine communities are left out of constitutional privileges, administrative classification systems, and how this omission is utilised to capture resources, deny recognition, and exclude them from their constitutional and sovereign rights over land, water, and livelihood.
Change begins when people are able to name the structures that keep them unequal, and then act together to challenge them. Baba Saheb Ambedkar’s call to “educate, agitate and organise” has shaped how I understand this process. Public hearings, public inquiry, mobilisation and evidence-building turn lived experience into truth, truth into political pressure, and people move from being governed to asserting rights.Evita Das