Farmer[4] and the experience in 1969 of driving on the ‘overland route’ from Cambridge to New Delhi with John Harriss stimulated a vocation for India, research and teaching.

[6] From then on, in long-term field studies of rural markets in South India as they evolved over 45 years, in North India over 25 years, and in briefer spells in Francophone West Africa, in Bangladesh and the Himalayan border state of Arunachal, she developed and applied a framework through which to unpack the triple role of rural markets[7] in development.

In 2003, ‘India Working’,[9] a synthesis about the socially regulated ‘informal’ economy and its shadow state, was published by Cambridge University Press and ‘Rural Commercial Capital’, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, on West Bengal won her the Edgar Graham Prize[10] for originality in Development Studies.

[14] Payne felt the moment was right to embed nutritional competences inside UN agencies in order to judge the human outcomes of all forms of development.

At Oxford, she contributed field-based research to the study of the relations between deprivation and India's capitalist market economy:[20] nutrition,[21] the life chances of girls,[22] gender subordination,[23] poverty, ill-health and disability,[24] destitution,[25] ageing,[26] stigma and caste discrimination,[27] incomplete citizenship[28] and the oppressive conditions of waste-work,[29] together with the politics of the policy processes which fail to address these dimensions of human under-development.

She then chaired the first Research Assessment Exercise in Development Studies[33] nationally for the Higher Education Funding Council for England and refused a civil honour.

In retirement from Oxford, she holds a visiting professorship in the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India,[36] a professorial research associateship at SOAS, University of London,[37] and is an emeritus fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford[38] where she convenes the South Asia Research Cluster.

Concerned about the difficulty of mainstreaming the ecological crisis into development studies, she has embarked on new Indian field-research on the economy as a waste-producing system[39] and on the political obstacles posed to renewable energy policy and technology.