Deepa Kurup

India

Contemporary India (MSc), 2015
St Catherine's College, Oxford

Funding: Louis Dreyfus

Deepa completed an MPhil in Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development, and an MSc at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Oxford University, both with distinctions. She won Somerville’s 2017 Principal’s Prize for academic excellence, and is an Oxford Indira Gandhi Scholar with the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development at Somerville College since 2016.

Sheis currently reading for a DPhil at the Oxford Department of International Development, Oxford University. Her research focusses on the political economy of social protection in India.

Prior to her studies, Deepa has worked as Principal Correspondent for a leading Indian newspaper, The Hindu for over seven years. Interested in issues around India’s lagging social development despite its rapid economic growth, Deepa has covered a wide range of issues from environment, disability, crime and higher education, to more specialized topics such as the state of labour, work and wages of the vast urban working class in India.

She would like to use her experience as a journalist and her training in academia to create news platforms — akin to Democracy Now — that specialize in issues related to development in her native India.