Amrita Pande

Amrita Pande is an Indian sociologist and feminist ethnographer based in South Africa, tenured as a professor at the University of Cape Town. She was the first to publish a detailed ethnographical study on the surrogacy industry in India with her book Wombs in Labor. Pande has also been appointed as the lead for the National Research Foundation project into the surrogacy industry of South Africa.

Biography Pande was born in India to an academic family and graduated from the University of Delhi with a Bachelor of Arts in economics followed by a Master of Arts at the Delhi School of Economics. She states that the practice and curriculum at the premier but inflexible and apolitical institute killed her interest in the field and from which she sought refuge through the discipline of sociology. The work was published and described by the Columbia University Press as the first detailed ethnographical study into the transnational surrogacy industry in India.

Pande's works have been published in a number of international journals including Anthropologica, Qualitative Sociology, Current Sociology, Critical Social Policy, Feminist Studies and International Migration Review. The South African National Research Foundation has appointed her to lead a project into the surrogacy industry in the country.

The Guardian notes that the media in India frames surrogacy either in terms of a great positive, as a boom of a life changing sum of money or as a great negative of poverty stricken women being forced into "renting wombs", a binary which according to Pande is detrimental to discourse and removes agency from the women involved. She also works as a performer-educator with a multimedia theatre production called Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm, which is based on her work on the surrogacy industry.