Hi and welcome to my website!

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. My interests are in public policy research with a particular interest in the selection and training of administrative personnel and a regional focus on India.

I focus on sub-national recruitment of government officials in India. Using a mixed-methods approach, I study why understaffing persists at a state level despite budgetary and political sanctions and a high demand for government jobs. I use a combination of qualitative methods such as elite interviews to do process tracing and complement this with techniques of computational social science such as text analysis.

I primarily work with administrative data utilizing data from government reports, notifications, orders, and memoranda to analytically study recruitment policy in India. I also scrape data from newspapers and e-courts databases to track impediments to capacity-building initiatives. I received Gupta-Klinsky India Institute’s inaugural Sunil Kumar and Sumati Murli Research Award for this project.

I am a research assistant for Professor Devesh Kapur on A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey which examines how India attempted four concurrent transformations—building a state, creating an economy, changing society, and forging a sense of nationhood under conditions of universal suffrage. I am also a research assistant for Professor Yuen Yuen Ang on The Polytunity Project, an intellectual platform built around the concept of “polytunity”: a lens coined by Prof. Ang to reframe the narrative of today’s disruptions from impending fear to possibility. My work has featured in reports of state and national level committees, Reserve Bank of India, and World Bank’s World Development Report 2025: Standards for Development.

Before the Ph.D., I was a policy researcher with Mercatus Centre, IDFC Institute (now Artha Global Advisors), Swaniti Initiative, and Open Society Foundation, having worked on a wide range of topics: economic liberalization, data governance, and fiscal federalism. I was also a Teach for India Fellow teaching low-income school kids in the slums of Delhi and Mumbai.

You can view my CV here. And if you want to know what I look like: the picture is below.