Dr. Kaushik Ranjan Bandyopadhyay is a Professor and Chairperson of the Business Sustainability Area at IIM Lucknow, where he also heads the Centre for Business Sustainability. He serves as a member of the board of IIML Enterprise Incubation Centre. Dr. Bandyopadhyay brings over twenty years of experience in academia, policy research, and administration, including his former position as Principal Policy Adviser at the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD). He led efforts on the UNEP India Mission, concentrating on measuring SDG 12.c.1, and served as a Senior Associate for the India Consensus Project, which was jointly managed by Tata Trusts and the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.
Dr. Bandyopadhyay is presently a member of various distinguished committees, such as the Advisory Committee of the Green Entrepreneurship Council (GEC) at CII, FICCI’s National Task Force on ESG, and the Steering Committee of the Asia Pacific Resource Centre (APRC) of the UN Global Compact Network of India. Furthermore, he serves as a member of the Independent ESG Rating Review Committee of one of the leading credit rating agencies in India namely ICRA Private Limited. He is also involved with academic boards and thesis examination committees at prestigious institutions, including various IIMs, IITs, and IISc Bangalore. He recently participated as a jury member for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women selection program. His latest research project focused on examining the effects of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism on India's steel sector, carried out in collaboration with Yale University, Tufts University’s Fletcher School, and the Sridath Ramphal Centre at the University of West Indies.
He has previously held several notable positions, including serving as a member of the sub-group on the transport sector established by the Government of India to provide insights to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2010. He was a columnist on the energy sector for the Financial Express from 2009 to 2011 and has been a visiting faculty member at the United Nations University (UNU-IIST) as well as the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) at the University of Delhi. Additionally, he has worked as a visiting scholar with the Asian Growth Institute (AGI) in Japan, supported by the Kakenhi Grant from the Japanese Society of Promotion of Science (JSPS). He has also contributed as a transport specialist for an ADB-commissioned project on Low Carbon Transport, served as an invitee consultant with the IEA/OECD, worked as an Economic Officer with the Finance Commission of the Government of India, and acted as a Research Officer to the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development.
He is a highly regarded speaker at TEDx events and prominent conferences, was honoured with the Springer Best Author Award in 2025 and the Wipro Earthian Faculty Mentor Award in 2018. His research is featured in prestigious scholarly journals including International Environment Agreement: Politics, Law and Economics; Energy Economics; Energy Policy; and Annual Review of Environment and Resources, among numerous others. His current areas of teaching and research interests encompass the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), decarbonisation strategies in the steel sector, climate change and carbon markets, ESG, transport and environment, as well as various facets of business sustainability and circular economy practices.
He obtained his PhD in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and is an alumnus of the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership (CISL) at Cambridge University, the ILR School at Cornell University, and Babson College in the USA, where he completed programs on business sustainability, program evaluation, and entrepreneurship following his PhD.
