Mihir Bhatt, MS
Fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Visiting Scientist, Harvard School of Public Health
Director, All India Disaster Mitigation Institute
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-focused effort to record and discuss the Mumbai train bombing on July 11, 2006, and the emergency response. More information is available at http://www.mumbaivoices.com.
Mihir Bhatt has pushed what is called “beneficiary feedback” on the performance of NGO and UN humanitarian agencies through his evaluations of the DEC Response in the 2001 Earthquake in Gujarat, India and the recovery to the 2004 South Asian tsunami. He is currently at work 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.
Mihir 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) for providing potential leadership in perceiving upcoming disaster risks almost a decade ahead of most existing leaders and providing leadership for promoting US-India links to address these risks; and, most recently, the Ashoka International Fellowship (2004) for his innovative and creative approach for using social enterprise for long-term recovery of the poor among victims. Most recently, he has set up a risk transfer initiative—including Afat Vimo: a life and non-life disaster insurance and risk mitigation program—for the 12,000 micro-enterprise beneficiaries (of earthquake, riot, tsunami, and flood disasters) of AIDMI’s Livelihood Relief Fund. Mihir 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.