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= Dr. T. Vasantha Kumaran = Dr. T. Vasantha Kumaran: a Commonwealth Professional Fellow (2012) at the Staffordshire University Business Village and North Staffordshire Press Limited, and formerly a Professor and Head of Geography at University of Madras, Chennai (1978-2009), his academic interests range from geography of healthcare, medical geography, natural resources management, environmental assessment, community development planning, sustainable development, and to GIS and Remote Sensing.

Career and Research
He was involved in Social Impact Assessment (SIA) studies as part of the Environmental Impact Assessment of newly developing captive power industries for metal and alloy production across the country, in Tamil Nadu (Dharmapuri, Nagapattinam, Thoothukudi districts), Karnataka (Hassan district), undivided Andhra Pradesh (Anantapur district), Rajasthan (Kota) and Gujarat (Gandhidham), since retirement (during 2009-13).

During 2013-16, he was involved in state level projects for mapping and survey of properties and utilities in five Tamil Nadu municipalities, namely, Dindigul, Erode, Sivagangai, Udhagamandalam and Virudhunagar and then for mapping and surveying street vending (vendors) and homeless population in Madurai and 44 other towns of Tamil Nadu towards developing GIS-MIS for the Commissionerate of Municipal Administration of Tamil Nadu as a GIS consultant with InfoMaps, a private mapping organization in Chennai (2012-15). Dr. Kumaran is still on the roll of the InfoMaps as Chief Consultant.

Since 2016, he has been involved in Revisit Projects of (a) Theni Villages under desertification (the earlier project was a Madras-Waterloo University collaborative research 1998-2001) addressing ecological restoration and sustainable livelihoods (2016-18); and (b) Kollihills addressing Community Action Planning, capacity building towards sustainable livelihoods (2018-20). In both the Revisit Projects the focus has been and is on women empowerment through individual / group / community development projects and seed funding income generating activities. The two projects are entirely funded by Professor Bala Hyma, formerly Professor of Geography at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Currently he specializes in teaching / imparting knowledge and expertise on participatory appraisal methods, participatory action research and socio-economic and household surveys, his latest assignment being the one with the Hand in Hand Academy (India International) for Social Entrepreneurship at Kaliyanoor, Kanchipuram (2018). He has expertise for developing research and action research proposals for international and national funding agencies and facilitates international university collaborations, the latest being one between Madurai Kamaraj University India and Laikipia University Kenya (2018). He has earlier developed proposals for South Eastern University of Sri Lanka (2009-12). His expertise spans human and social sciences, geo-informatics, natural resources and environmental management with focus on innovative projects involving science and technology.

Early Career
Earlier, Dr. Kumaran collaborated with researchers from Staffordshire (2004-09), Northampton (2008-09), and Durham (1992-93) Universities, UK; Department of Human Geography of Orebro University (1986-89), Sweden; Globalism Institute of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia (2001-08); Waterloo, Guelph, McMaster and York Universities, Canada (1994-2007); Bonn University, Germany (2007-10) and Masaryk University, Czech Republic (2009-11). He had  long  association with  the  University of  Waterloo  in Canada, participating in various research programmes on Sustainable Community Development during 1995-2003. He was also associated with research on Ecosystem Approach to Human Health in Chennai, Toronto and Hamilton (2002-2007) in collaboration with McMaster and York Universities and then collaborated with the Bonn University of Germany on health vulnerability research in Chennai slums during (2007-10).

He was actively involved in the promotion of geography at the school and has published several text books for Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation and Oxford University Press in school geography. He had several national (82) and international publications (18) including books (8) and atlases (notably A Socio-Economic Atlas of India for Oxford University Press 1987).

He was a member of the IGU Commission on Geographical Information Science (2004-08) and was a Research Associate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University (2004-08).

After Retirement
On his retirement from the University of Madras in 2009, he was involved in eight before-the-fact Environmental / Social Impact Assessment projects for industrial power projects across India, five urban utility and mapping projects (2012-15) under the World Bank assisted urban local bodies in Tamil Nadu state of India involving surveys of more than 2 million households and properties, and GIS-MIS for street vendors in Madurai city and 44 other intermediate and small towns (2014-15) of the state and also GIS-MIS for homeless in the same 45 cities and towns of Tamil Nadu as the Chief Consultant of the INFOMAPS of Chennai.

In his academic years (1978-2009), he visited 44 countries in Africa, North America, Central America, Europe, Asia and Australia on academic pursuits of various kinds.