Dr. Indira Hirway, Director and Professor of Economics at Center for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad, India, has done her Masters in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics and Ph D at the Department of Economics at Mumbai University.

The major areas of her interest are poverty and human development, labour and employment, globalisation and related policies, development alternatives and development paradigms, environment and development, environment accounting, gender and development, time use studies etc. She has written several books and published a large number of research papers in reputed Indian and international journals. She has been associated with a number of expert groups, task forces, technical committees and study groups set up by the Central and state governments as well as international bodies. She has spent several semesters as visiting fellow/faculty at Oxford University, Erasmus University at Rotterdam, Amsterdam University, University of Utah at Salt Lake City and at Levy Institute at New York University.

She recently chaired the Working Group on Gender and Agriculture, Land Issues, Innovative Finance and Public Private Partnership set up by the Planning Commission for the Eleventh Plan. She is also a member of the Feminist Economists Group set up by the Planning Commission for engendering the Eleventh Plan and (2) Expert Group set up for designing Gender Development Index(GDI) and Gender Empowerment Measure(GEM).