Mihir Bhatt, MA

FXB Affiliate

Mihir Bhatt directs the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, which he founded in 1989. AIDMI began as a three-person team and has grown to a staff of 83 working in 11 activity centers. He is a member of the managing committee for the mumbaiVOICES project, a grassroots effort to record and discuss the Mumbai train bombing of July 11, 2006, and the response to that emergency (http://www.mumbaivoices.com). Bhatt has pushed for “beneficiary feedback” on the performance of NGO and UN humanitarian agencies through his evaluations of the Disaster Emergency Committee’s response to the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, India, and to the recovery following the 2004 South Asian tsunami. He is currently evaluating the humanitarian work of both UN and international nongovernmental agencies on tsunami relief and rehabilitation activities in coastal areas of South India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Bhatt has received the Russell E. Train Institutional Fellowship from the World Wildlife Fund (1997) for building, from the bottom up, an action-focused research institution focused on a global issue—risk reduction—in the South, the Eisenhower Fellowship (2000), and the Ashoka International Fellowship (2004). Bhatt received a master’s degree in city planning for developing areas from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and a master’s degree in urban and regional planning in India in 1989.