Alaka Basu

Alaka Malwade Basu (born 1951 ) is an Indian sociologist and demographer, a professor of development sociology at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She is a senior fellow for public health at the United Nations Foundation and a member of the editorial boards of the Population and Development Review and the Asian Population Studies. She is also a member of the Lancet-Guttmacher Commission on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Basu has extensive publications in the fields of social demography, gender and development, and South Asian Studies. and the chairperson of the scientific committee on anthropological demography at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and member of committees on population projections and reproductive health at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, United States.