Sumit Mazumdar
Senior Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Dr Sumit Mazumdar is a health economist specialising on the economics of health system reforms and financing in low-and-middle-income countries. His work primarily focusses on issues related to the political economy and institutional economics aspects of health financing programmes across different global contexts. Sumit’s research combines theoretical insights and empirical methods from economics, politics, and global health to develop interdisciplinary approaches in health systems and policy research.

In his current projects, Sumit is working on developing new methods, metrics, and empirical evidence on several interconnected issues around equitable and effective Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in countries of South and West Asia, Latin America, and North Africa.
These include the role of subnational state capacity to influence impacts of health policies; political and institutional drivers of health system fragmentation; political settlements critical to the design and implementation UHC-sensitive reforms; and health financing policy options in conflict-affected, humanitarian contexts having a prominent role of non-state actors. He also uses political economy frameworks to examine how public policy responses against major epidemics in colonial India can be better understood through complex interactions between diverse group of actors – both native and the colonial powers – that continue to be relevant in understanding the role of powerful groups in shaping contemporary health policy. Through collaborations with leading regional experts, academics and policy specialists in West Asia, Sumit is involved in research projects that study financial risk protection in health in protracted conflict contexts in the region and aim to inform resilient and sustainable policy measures.

Before joining CHE in 2018, Sumit has worked for more than 10 years across leading universities, research institutes and policy thinktanks in India. He established the Population Health and Nutrition Research Programme at the Institute for Human Development (IHD), New Delhi and had completed several projects on health financing, maternal and child health and child nutrition with funding from organisations such as the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), The World Bank, and 3ie. He has been involved in teaching courses on Indian Economic Development, Computational Methods in Economics, Health Economics for Development and Programme Evaluation in Public Health. He has been a lead author for Human Development Reports for several Indian states including Delhi, Assam, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Daman and Diu. Sumit had also actively collaborated with civil society organisations on advocacy projects such as on social health insurance for the Poorest Area Civil Society (PACS) and on MDGs for the Wada Na Todo Abhiyan, for which he attended the UN General Assembly Special Session on MDGs in 2013.

Sumit holds a PhD in health economics from the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai and postgraduate degrees in Population Studies and in Economics. His current PhD students are working on different topics in global health financing, development assistance in health, programme impact evaluation and adolescent health and nutrition in India.

Dr Mazumdar is a member of the Global Advisory Group of the Health Systems Global Technical Working Group (HSG-TWG) on Fragile and Conflict-affected States and a member of the Editorial Board of the Indian Journal of Human Development. He holds an honorary position of Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi. Apart from professional academic publications, he regularly contributes to op-ed pieces in leading English and vernacular dailies in India. He tweets as @sumitmazumdar.

Research

Research group(s)

• Global health

Supervision

Sumit will not have capacity to take on further supervision until the end of 2024.