Jaya Dhindaw is the Program Director – Integrated Urban Development, Planning and Resilience at WRI India. She is based in Bangalore and provides strategic leadership to all Urban Planning initiatives across WRI India, managing relationship with key partners, stakeholders and the global WRI network. Jaya leads the practice’s work on advancing goals for sustainable development in Indian cities to enable and influence knowledge building and on-ground impactful interventions through instruments such as Transit Oriented Development and Structural Reforms.
Jaya has over 16 years of global experience in a diverse set of roles within the domain of Sustainable Urban Planning. Prior to joining WRI India, Jaya was Lead Urban Planner with the Center for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP) at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where she engaged with government stakeholders to look at innovative strategies for growth and development in cities by way of ordinance restructuring along with policy and implementation tools. Here, Jaya was also involved with the Goethe Institute’s Youth Program on Sustainable Development as an invited expert, which was awarded project of the UNESCO world decade on Education for Sustainable Development.
Jaya worked for 8 years with the City of Charlotte, North Carolina, first in the Transit Department as part of the team that put in place the 9.6 mile maiden light rail line in the city and then with the Planning Department as Planning Coordinator for the Urban Design section, where she led several mission critical strategic planning and economic development initiatives for neighborhoods and mentored the execution of many high-profile proposals to help further the city’s economic and urban development goals. Jaya also worked with Neighborhood Concepts, a planning & design consulting firm in Charlotte and with the Metropolitan Growth Alliance, a non-profit in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jaya earned her undergraduate degree in Architecture from the University of Pune and a Master’s degree in City Planning, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. She also studied Community Planning with a focus on Environmental Planning from the University of Cincinnati. Jaya serves as Managing Associate Editor for the Journal of Sustainable Urbanization, Planning and Progress by Whioce Publishing, Singapore.