Biography

Dr. Debajit Palit is an educator, researcher, practitioner, author, editor, columnist, & trainer. Dr. Palit has more than 27 years of experience working in the field of energy transition, renewable energy, clean energy access, rural electrification, decentralized energy, mini-grids, energy-gender-poverty nexus, and water-energy-food nexus. He has been listed in the Top 2% World's Scientists (last 5 years in a row) by Stanford University and Elsevier BV.

Currently, Dr. Palit is the Centre Head, Centre for Climate Change and Energy Transition at Chintan Research Foundation (CRF), a global policy research think tank committed to advancing innovation & shaping policy through rigorous research & thought leadership.

Before joining CRF in January 2025, Dr. Palit served as a Professor of Energy at the NTPC School of Business, India where he taught courses on energy transition and distributed generation & microgrids and also delivered international MDPs on various energy topics. Earlier, during his association with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a global policy and research thinktank, from 1998 to March 2022, he has executed nearly 200 analytical & action research and implementation projects and handled around 70 projects as Principal Investigator/Team Leader in the field of clean energy technology, resource assessment; energy planning; decentralized energy project implementation; rural electrification policy and regulation, monitoring, evaluation, and impact assessment and capacity building. In TERI, he led the Rural Energy and Livelihood Division for almost a decade as the Director and Senior Fellow. He is also the Vice President (honorary) of the Indian Association for Energy Economics and is/has been part of various Expert Groups/Committees such as the LVDC Distribution Systems Sectional Committee (ETD 50), steered by the Bureau of Indian Standards, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy Committee for Benchmark costs for Decentralized Solar Applications and Working Group WG C6.38 of CIGRE (Council on Large Electric Systems). Earlier, he also served as a member of the technical committee of the Decentralized Distributed Generation scheme under the National Rural Electrification Programme of the Government of India.

Dr. Palit possesses vast national and international experience, working in projects for UN organizations, bilateral agencies, The World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and federal governments across 17 countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Palit has also written widely on energy access and rural electrification issues, and has published three books and around 150 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, books, and magazines/newspapers. He is a sought-out speaker on rural and renewable energy issues, rural electrification and electricity transition, water-energy-food, energy-poverty-livelihood, and energy-gender-poverty nexus and has participated in more than 100 conferences and workshops across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Dr. Palit holds a Masters degree in Physics and a PhD in Energy Policy.