Saswat Rath is a Senior Technical Advisor at I4DI, where he provides technical leadership on water stewardship, WASH, and public health programming. With 20 years of experience spanning evaluation design, corporate sustainability strategy, and large-scale public health systems in India and across the Global South, Saswat brings both the technical rigor and the stakeholder fluency needed to bridge the gap between evidence and action.
Saswat’s career has been defined by working at the intersection of the public and private sectors on water. At Gap Inc., he served as Chief of Party for the $32 million Women + Water Alliance — a six-year partnership between USAID, Gap Inc., and six major NGOs including CARE, Water.org, and WaterAid — advancing water access, quality, and resilience for women in cotton-growing and textile-manufacturing communities across India. He led the development of Gap Inc.’s 2030 global water strategy and managed WWF’s water stewardship advisory services to the company, setting contextual targets for water-stressed areas and representing Gap Inc. in the Water Resilience Coalition. At Waterplan, a climate-tech SaaS company, he steered M&E efforts helping multinational corporations measure, monitor, and report on their water stewardship initiatives. Earlier in his career, he pioneered the M&E framework for India’s National Adolescent Health Program and led evaluation and public health projects with FHI 360, the World Food Program, and India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Saswat holds a Master’s in Health Management from the Indian Institute of Health Management Research and a B.Com. from Utkal University. He speaks English, Hindi, and Oriya.
