Former GB Pant Director Badri Narayan Tiwari Appointed Vice-Chancellor of TISS

Professor Badri Narayan Tiwari holds a PhD in Modern History from the University of Allahabad and has worked with the Centre for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Professor Badri Narayan Tiwari, a noted social historian and former Director of the GB Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj, has been appointed Vice-Chancellor of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. His appointment by the Ministry of Education is for a five-year term or until further notice. He took charge on the evening of July 30.

This is the first appointment of a TISS Vice-Chancellor under the new University Grants Commission (UGC) rules. In 2023, TISS came under the administrative purview of the central government, as it receives over 50% of its funding from the Centre. With this shift, the Tata Trusts–led governance model was replaced. The earlier Governing Board has now been substituted by an Executive Council headed by the Vice-Chancellor.

Professor Tiwari succeeds Professor Shalini Bharat, whose term ended in September 2023. Since then, TISS was being overseen by Professor Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Director of IIM-Mumbai, in an interim capacity. During his nearly two-year stewardship, the institute implemented several governance reforms—framing a new Memorandum of Agreement, clearing ₹14 crore in past liabilities, launching an accreditation process, and integrating admissions with the Common University Entrance Test (CUET).

Professor Badri Narayan Tiwari holds a PhD in Modern History from the University of Allahabad and has worked with the Centre for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion at Jawaharlal Nehru University. As Director of the GB Pant Institute, he led research in areas aligned with TISS’s mission—social equity, marginalised communities, and participatory democracy. He is widely published in the fields of Dalit politics, subaltern studies, cultural anthropology, and Indian democracy.

He is also a prominent literary voice. In 2022, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his Hindi poetry collection Tumdi ke Shabd, and in 2025, he was conferred the Kanhaiya Lal Sethia Award for Poetry by the Jaipur Literature Festival.