Dr. Harshita Sinha holds a PhD from the Department of International Development, London
School of Economics and Political Science. Her research comparatively examines informal
migrant workers’ access to welfare across sub-national welfare ecosystems in India through the
lens of substantive citizenship. Her research looks in particular at the implementation of labour-
based welfare rights through the Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) welfare
boards and the e-Shram portal, examining how digitalisation, formalisation, and sub-national
welfare regimes shape migrant workers’ access to social rights. She has an expanding research
agenda on climate-induced mobility and risk. She has contributed to policy outputs such as the
UNICEF study on Assessing Portability of Social Protection for Migrant Children in India; the
ODI paper on Transforming social protection for irreversible climate change-induced loss and
damage.

Harshita has engaged extensively in policy and research with organisations such as ODI Global,
the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, the International Centre of Tax and Development,
Centre for Policy Research, and ICRW, among others. Her work on informality, migration and
social protection has been published in journals such as Global Social Policy and Urbanisation.
She has also written widely for newspapers and other media, including the Indian Express, India
Development Review, LSE International Development Blog, and The Wire, among others.
Harshita received the LSE Life Research Prize in 2019 and was selected as the India Migration
Fellow by IMN and Bandhu Urban Tech, where she worked at the intersection of research and
grounded intervention for migrant groups. She founded Voices of Informality, a platform that
translates ethnographic research on informal workers and migrants into accessible narratives and
resources co-created with civil society partners for advocacy and policy debates.