Dr Miniya Chatterji, director and founder of the centre of sustainability at industrialist Ajay Piramal-led Anant National University, Ahmedabad, has been researching vacant infrastructure across India for about a year. The study is a deep dive into why 7.5 per cent of all residential buildings in the country are lying empty, and how they can be put to better use. It's almost serendipitous that Chatterji, a PhD holder from Harvard University and Columbia University, will now be channelling this knowledge for a new purpose: to develop COVID-19 recovery facilities to ease the pressure on overburdened healthcare systems.

"With the government struggling to contain and treat the rising number of patients, we realised there is a mammoth need to scale up temporary hospitals and provide affordable, out-of-the-box solutions," Chatterji says in a telephonic interview from her home in Goa, where she lives with her husband and two-year-old son.