Varsha Velusamy is a development sector professional with over eight years of experience working at the intersection of climate resilience, livelihoods and public policy across India’s Himalayan and North-Eastern regions. Her work focuses on strengthening community-based institutions and local economic systems that shape how communities anticipate, absorb and recover from shocks in ecologically fragile and disaster-prone landscapes.
Through extended field engagement with tribal communities in remote regions such as Meghalaya, Varsha has designed and operationalised climate-resilient agri-enterprise models, cooperative-owned processing infrastructure, and community–public–private partnerships embedded within sensitive ecosystems.
Her experience spans multiple governance levels, from working with village-level community institutions and state governments to national policy engagement through the Mahatma Gandhi National Fellowship under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and the Indian Institute of Management, and now to country-level investment and policy work with the International Fund for Agricultural Development. In her current role, she supports agroecology-aligned value chains, focusing on enterprise de-risking, blended finance and investment frameworks that translate grassroots realities into scalable policy and financing solutions.
She is a motorcycle enthusiast and has travelled over 20,000 kilometres across India, gaining first-hand exposure to diverse geographies and communities and reinforcing her belief in experiential learning and cross-country partnerships.
