World Bank appoints Patna boy as its key climate person in South Asia

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– globalbihari bureau

Washington:  The World Bank has appointed Abhas Jha, who hails from Bihar and is an alumnus of Patna’s St. Xavier’s High School,  to a key position on climate change and disaster management in South Asia.

Jha will be based out of Singapore as World Bank’s Practice Manager for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management for South Asia.

His role will be to  help the South Asia region (SAR) Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change team to connect and collaborate across Global Practice boundaries, the bank said in a statement on Friday.

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Jha will also work closely with other Practice Managers, Global Leads and Global Solutions Groups to incubate, pilot and scale-up innovative and high-quality development solutions, and to promote the generation and flow of global knowledge to serve these countries, the bank said.

Also read (in Hindi): कन्याक कोहबर बांस-पुरैन और उनका विस्वास

Jha’s was also World Bank’s  Practice Manager, Urban Development and Disaster Risk Management (East Asia and the Pacific) within the Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice for the World Bank. He led operations and strategy, technical quality control and risk management of one of the largest portfolios of infrastructure lending, technical assistance, and advisory services within the World Bank. He has worked  on cities, infrastructure finance and economics, risk and resilience, and public policy.

Jha, who had served as Indian Administrative Service officer for 12 years, has been with the World Bank since 2001. He has worked on policy reform and development finance in a variety of countries including China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Jamaica, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Peru.

Abhas had also served as Adviser to the World Bank Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Sri Lanka.

Abhas is the lead author of “Safer Homes, Stronger Communities: A Handbook for Reconstructing after Disasters” (2010) and “Cities and Flooding: A Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management” (2012) and has edited/co-edited or contributed chapters to several other publications.[the_ad_placement id=”sidebar-feed”]