She has expertise in gender, rural development, sustainable agriculture, food security, rural household energy, indigenous knowledge systems, forest management and common property resources. She has been undertaking research in South Asia since 1989 and has undertaken micro-scale ethnographic fieldwork on local agricultural and forest management systems in Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. Her current research interests are focused on the gendered nature of household energy, cookstove and sanitation choices and the implications of these choices for health, food and economic security.