< Team
Roshni Shanker
Executive Director
Roshni Shanker is the Founder and Executive Director of the Migration and Asylum Project (MAP), India’s first and only dedicated law centre for forced migration and displacement. After completing her law degree, Roshni worked with one of India's leading law firms as a corporate lawyer. She later pursued a Masters from Columbia Law School, NYC, with a focus on international law and human rights. She joined UNHCR in 2010 and worked as a refugee status determination expert in various field offices, including India, Egypt and the UAE. Realising that traditional humanitarian interventions often fail to recognise the centrality of legal assistance to post-displacement recovery, and believing these gaps to be best addressed by grassroots organisations familiar with the local context, Roshni returned to India to set up MAP. MAP pioneered and instiutionalised the concept of legal representation in the asylum process in India and is one of the few organisations globally to have been authorised by UNHCR to represent asylum claims before the agency. Roshni was also a visiting faculty member at the National Law School of India University (Bengaluru) where she taught International Refugee Law. She has published in the Forced Migration Review, Refugee Law Initiative, and International Journal of Refugee Law, amongst others.
At MAP, she is responsible for the overall management, fundraising and M&E.