Rajan Sudesh Ratna
Dr. Rajan Sudesh Ratna is presently working as Deputy Head of South and South-West Office of UN ESCAP, New Delhi since August 2018 and leading research, policy advisory and capacity building on helping countries accelerate progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. He has led the capacity building programme of training more than 3000 women entrepreneurs from Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) of South and South-West Asia for using digital marketing and e-commerce platforms for promoting their business and becoming part of national, regional and global supply chains.
For his work on empowering women in South Asia he has been awarded by: Womennovator Year Award 2021 (June 2021); Atal Samman 2023 by Manav Kalyan Society, India (January 2023); and Male Champion of the Year Award 2023 for Empowering Women’ (June 2023) by Women in Management and International Finance Cooperation in the Global Economic Forum, 2023.
He is currently leading the research and capacity building work on sustainable graduation of LDCs, crossborder connectivity in transport, energy, ICT and supply chain, especially in the context of BBIN subregion. He earlier worked in Trade, Investment and Innovation Division in Bangkok from July 2012 to August 2018, where he handled the work of research and capacity building on WTO and RTAs trade policy making and trade negotiations.
During 2008 to 2010 he worked as Professor and Head, Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi. He handled the research activities on WTO and FTA/PTA negotiation, the outreach & capacity building programmes and facilitated several stakeholders’ consultations for Government on WTO and FTA issues to disseminate the information relating to negotiations including challenges for private sector and build consensus between the policy makers and private sector on issues that were holding conclusion of negotiations.
Dr. Ratna is an Indian civil servant and had worked for 25 years in the Government of India, mostly in the Ministry of Commerce handling the formulations of India’s foreign trade policy and trade negotiations in WTO and FTAs. He had negotiated the Uruguay and Doha Round negotiations in WTO and India’s Free Trade Agreements. Dr. Ratna is a Ph. D. in Economics from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi, India; M. Phil. in Environmental Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and done an Executive Programme on Trade Policy and Negotiations from Harvard University, Boston, USA.
He is a visiting Professor to various Universities - Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi; Lovely Professional University, Punjab; East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai, China; Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China; Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea. Regional Resource Person (from Asia Pacific) for the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO’s) Regional Trade Policy Course for Asia – Pacific region from 2009 – 2018; APEC Secretariat’s capacity building programmes; Mekong Institute, Thailand; International Institute for Trade and Development (ITD), Thailand.
He has organised more than 200 trainings for the policy makers as well as researchers and private sector on various topics including e-commerce, digital marketing, WTO, RTAs, negotiations, SPS, TBT, etc. He has written many books covering topics of WTO, Regional Trade Agreements; Trade Facilitation and Poverty Reduction; Rules of Origin; Mainstreaming Gender through Trade Policy; and has contributed chapters to several edited books and published several papers in peer reviewed journals. His latest publication is an edited book titled “Indian Agriculture Under the Shadows of WTO and FTAs” (Springer publications, 2021)