About Us
Meet Our Team
Our Leadership and Advisory Team
The WEFT team brings 20+ years of deep policy research and stakeholder interaction experiences, through accumulated research experiences at micro and macro levels of analysis (household, community, state, national and international levels).
Rekha Krishnan
Founder and Managing Partner
WEFT Research is founded and led by Rekha. She is an economist with over 20 years’ experience in policy research and analysis on sustainable energy, energy access, energy pricing, decentralised renewable energy, clean cooking energy access and water inequities. Rekha has worked with TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) for over ten years in various roles. She helped set up the Ashden India Renewable Energy Collective as a think-tank along with a group of enterprises that have won the prestigious Ashden Awards. In her projects, she has engaged with a range of clients including World Bank, Asian Development Bank, GIZ, DfID, Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation, Climate Parliament, various ministries of the Government of India and a number of energy companies. Rekha has developed energy-water plans for rural clusters, conducted field impact assessments of energy price volatility and water stress on communities and has devised elaborate systems of indicators such as one to measure country-level energy security risks and vulnerabilities.
Suresh Krishnan
Co-founder and Chief Advisor
An engineer and economist, Suresh has over three decades’ experience in the corporate sector in oil and gas, fertilizer, agro-chemicals, real estate and retail. He is passionate about the rights of marginalised groups and believes that business performance is closely inter-twined with social and environmental responsibility.
Nitish Jha PhD.
Principal Advisor, Water & Sanitation and Agriculture & Rural Development
An anthropologist and economist, Nitish has extensive research and field experience in water and sanitation and in sustainable agriculture practices in India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and USA. As a Consulting Institutional Specialist for the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, he has been involved in strengthening institutional capacity of the provinces for investment planning, project design & implementation, and resource management.
Hari Natarajan
Principal Advisor, Energy Access, Renewable Energy & Sustainable Development
Hari Natarajan has around 18 years of experience in the energy sector, especially the clean energy and energy access space in India. During this period, he has been involved in a wide range of activities spanning grass-root level interventions, incubation, business development support, enterprise & end-user financing, regulatory & policy level engagement and networking, including the establishment and management of an industry association for decentralized renewable energy enterprises. Technology solutions that he has worked with include solar home systems, mini-grids, solar pumping, pico & micro hydro systems, biogas and biomass systems, improved cookstoves, etc. He has also been involved in utility scale policy and regulatory interventions post the Electricity Act 2003.
Rashmi Gopal
Principal Associate, Environmental Education
Rashmi Gopal is a qualified engineer with close to a decade of experience in the engineering and software industries. A passion to work on environmental concerns led her to the field of environmental education, where, over the past 15 years, she has worked extensively with teachers, students, businesses and governments in India and the Sultanate of Oman on designing and executing environmental awareness programmes. She interacts with businesses on consultancy projects and facilitates Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. Her interest lies in sensitizing young adults and teachers on different aspects of sustainable development and towards this she has developed a host of teaching and training aids on environmental issues such as water management, renewable energy, rainwater harvesting and climate change.
Our Strengths
Conceptual Clarity
Analytical Rigour
Cross-Domain Expertise
Our Partners and Clients
