Dr. Richa has obtained her M.Phil. and doctoral degree from the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has a multidisciplinary background and her preferred areas of specialization and interest include community and community participation, sustainable and inclusive development, eco-tourism, faith and development, education, micro-enterprise and health. Her doctoral research is an effort drawing from a number of disciplines such as economics, geography, demographic studies, environmental studies and anthropology. She has been actively engaged in the development sector over the last five years and has a gender affirmative perspective. She has worked with various NGOs and academic agencies in project co-ordination / implementation, awareness generation programmes, research and teaching. She is involved as a researcher in the Religions and Development Research Programme of the University of Birmingham. She was a research associate for a project on "Nature based Tourism in South Asian Countries" sponsored by the South Asian Network of Economic Research Institutes (SANEI) and has also done consultancy for CRY, NACO, UNIFEM and Project Development Corporation of Rajasthan (PDCOR) on projects related to Juvenile Justice, Drop-in-Centres for HIV/AIDS, Violence against Women, and Educational Infrastructure Development for Jalore district in Rajasthan under the public-private partnership model. Richa is currently working for the Institute of Integrated Himalayan Studies which is a UGC Centre of Excellence in the Himachal Pradesh University. She is co-ordinating a project entitled "Development in the Himalayan Villages: an Integrated Study" and is the editor of the bi-annual journal of the Institute, Himalayan Studies journal. She is a collaborating partner on behalf of Himachal Pradesh University with the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden, for a project entitled "Multimedia and GIS supported language documentation of the Himalayas with the focus on ethno-biological terms". She has been teaching Research Methodology and has a number of publications to her credit.