Prof. Sapna A. Narula is a well-known academician / researcher/practitioner in sustainability who has made immense contribution to the field of sustainability in business landscape through her teaching, research and consultancy efforts. She has also played a key role in advancing education for sustainability in India through a number of initiatives targeted at raising awareness generation and capacity building amongst corporates, youth, managers and policy-makers.
Her previous work experience includes working at TERI School of Advanced Studies where she was heading Department of Business & Sustainability alongside being engaged in teaching and research related to business sustainability. Before TERI SAS, she has also worked with College of Agribusiness Management, G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology, Pantnagar, Uttarakhand where she provided leadership to the Centre for Management Development and Centre for Placement and Counselling besides postgraduate teaching and research on agribusiness and food supply chains.
Through her career span of 21 years in University postgraduate teaching and research & industry, she has taught several courses to masters and PhD programmes viz. Business Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability Reporting, Sustainable Business Strategy, Business, Natural Ecosystems & Community, ICTs for Development, Agribusiness Management, Agricultural Marketing, Food Retail and Supply Chain Management, Strategic Management. Besides this, she was also involved in designing new academic programmes such as MBA (Business Sustainability), MBA (Infrastructure) MBA (Agribusiness), MBA (Food Retail & Supply Chain), MBA for engineers; restructured these programmes from time to time based on feedback from Industry, academicians, alumni and students. Her academic contribution also extends to launching several unique interdisciplinary courses, experimenting with innovative pedagogy and learning techniques and design of case studies on sustainability. On an average, she has taught 10 credits per year with the teaching feedback scores ranging from very good to excellent.
Her current research interests include exploring sustainability and CSR issues in Indian corporate landscape with a focus particularly on oil and gas, hotel, textile, mining and agribusiness and investigating the impact of climate change on agricultural supply chains and experimenting with strategies to reduce impact at the community level through technological, market and social interventions. Her action research has transformed lives of farmers and other underprivileged communities through sustainable business models involving capacity building, skill development and livelihood development.
Her work in use of ICTs (information and communication technologies) for sustainable development has won many accolades including Prosper.Net Scopus Young Scientist Award for Sustainable Development, 2011 delivered jointly by German Ministry, United Nations University & Elsevier and a Young Scientist Award (2009) from Uttarakhand Council for Science and Technology, Government of Uttarakhand.
Through her research and capacity building work, she has also contributed to a number of Central Govt. Initiatives such as Comprehensive District Agricultural Plan, AGMARKNET ( Agricultural Marketing Information Network ) scheme, Agriculture Marketing Infrastructure Scheme, National Agricultural Innovation Programme, National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, State Action Plans for Climate Change in Maharashtra and Assam, Rural Godown Scheme ( MoA), Agri- Export and other schemes of Govt. of Uttarakhand and other states.
She has supervised four PhDs and 120 Masters theses in the area of agribusiness, sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. She remains highly engaged with industry / academia for consultancy and knowledge exchange efforts and has delivered various keynote talks in reputed academic institutions/ international conferences/ symposia/ seminars/industry. She has published 65 papers in international peer-reviewed journals/ books.
A management development programme on sustainability reporting conceptualized and developed by her is extremely popular amongst the corporates in India and has attracted a lot of participation from leading organizations such as Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum, Engineers India, Oil India, PAAP automotive, Sterlite to name a few. She is a qualified trainer for Business and Ecosystem training from WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development), Geneva and has also obtained faculty development training from IIM Bangalore in the field of new product development and business strategy. A topper from Delhi University, she holds a Ph.D. in area of management from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and has also earned her postgraduate degrees in science (Miranda House, University of Delhi) and management both.
