Manjula Bharathy is a Professor, at the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance and is currently the Dean of the School of Habitat Studies, TISS, Mumbai. She has rich experience in teaching, researching, and engaging with questions of decentralized governance, subaltern and decolonial citizenship, and marginal subjectivities for about three decades. She works on topics of political philosophy, historical epistemology, and feminist political ecology and has been particularly involved in local governance issues related to women, tribals, transgender, and coastal communities. She has taught courses on feminist theories and perspectives, research methodology, decentralized governance & micro-level planning, the political economy of mediated governance, engendering governance, tribal governance, and gender and climate change.   

Dr. Bharathy was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Gender Studies at the University of Rutgers, USA, and was the Chief Operating Officer (COO at the State level), of Kudumbashree Mission, one of the largest CBOs in the world (42 lakh women as its members), the Poverty Eradication Mission of Government of Kerala. She was the  Faculty- in Charge of the Post Graduate Diploma Programme in Development Praxis for Kudumbashree members in Kerala. This Programme conceived by Dr. Bharathy was envisaged to equip graduate Kudumbashree women, mostly mainly from the BPL, SC/ST families to become barefoot researchers.

The Government of Kerala published and released her recent book, Brick By Brick-Democratising Local Governance: Insights From the People’s Plan with a foreword by Dr T. M Thomas Isaac. The volume tries to explore how the philosophical moorings of participatory and inclusive local governance confronted, negotiated, and at times succumbed to the hegemonic gender, tribal, and mediated power relations.

Her co-edited book, Tribal World: Shifting Boundaries and Contested Terrains tries to unravel the life-world of tribals, mostly invisible in the statist archives, as the constitutive other of historical temporality and politics. The edited volume attempts to address the issues and challenges of survival of the socially vulnerable tribal groups from theoretical and empirical perspectives, transcending disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, it hopes to focus on the questions of subjectivities, the political and social histories, and everyday practices of the tribals in the context of the continuing crises in contemporary India.

She has headed several research projects and field action interventions that search for alternate epistemologies from the subaltern communities that involve ‘Learning to Learn from Below’ towards epistemic justice.  She has contributed significantly to reimagining and redefining the gendered interventions in the Kudumbashree Mission that have been replicated today in 11 states of India and five countries outside India. She was in charge of conceptualizing and conducting Micro- Level Planning (MLP) in different Blocks of Leh District in Jammu and Kashmir as a part of the Tata-Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC)  Development Support Programme ( June 2004-2009), the first of its kind in Hindukush regions. She designed and led the Micro- level planning in all the tribal hamlets of Kerala, as an NRLM state project,  the first of such intervention in the state.

Recognising her work in Leh, Bharathy was nominated member of the Expert Committee on Decentralised Planning for the Sixth Schedule Areas by the Government of India. The committee released the report, which has become the basis for policy decisions on District Planning, in tribal areas, especially in the northeastern regions of India.  She was also a member of the Central Advisory Committee on Panchayati Raj, nominated by the President of India, to advise the Central Ministry of Panchayati Raj, on policies and practices in different States, to institutionalise good practices and to strengthen local governance and democratic decentralization in India. Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, in 2010, released the edited volume on the “Status of Decentralisation in India, wherein Ms.  Bharathy contributed to “Tribals and Decentralised Governance in India”.

Dr. Bharathy was the Team Lead of the Rights Based Information Campaign for a Field Action Project on community resilience to address climate change-aggravated high-tide flooding in the coastal villages of Central Kerala, funded by the AEIF, USA.  This participatory project was designed to empower local people to initiate, control, and take corrective action in disaster preparedness. It came out with gender and community counter-maps that co-created community-centric epistemologies in climate change, one of the pioneering interventions in India towards claiming subaltern agency and citizenship in climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions among the coastal communities.

She was a special invitee to deliver a lecture on Democratic Decentralisation at the London School of Economics; Ontario School of Education, University of Toronto;  University of Rosario, Argentina, and on engendering governance and LGBT discourses in Universities in California, Berkeley, New Jersey, Washington, North and South Carolina,  Arizona, and New York.

Dr. Bharathy has also directed documentaries and has won national and international accolades. Her documentary XXWhy, on Sree Nandu, an F2M transgender from Kerala premiered in Toronto.  The film has won the best documentary awards at the Kashish International Film Festival, Saathi Rainbow National Film Festival, and SOMS National Film Festival, The film was also screened in 16 international film festivals. Her other film ' Aamcha Patta Raj Satta ( Our Identity is Political Power) on selected EWRs in Maharashtra has been selected by different organizations and NGOs for strengthening the process of engendering local governance. She has co-directed 10 short films on gender issues in Kerala which were telecast by Doordarshan, Government of India.