Alumni Feature | Supriya Nayak U, Master’s in Public Policy ‘23

Supriya is a tech professional turned public policy student. Hailing from Mangalore, she spent her initial years in the small village of Udma, in Northern Kerala. Growing up in the bordering area of Kerala and Karnataka provided her the opportunity to learn immensely from its cultural, and linguistic diversity and thereby pick up five unique languages which include Konkani, Kannada and Malayalam. After graduating as a computer science engineer from Visvesvaraya Technological University, she worked as a software developer in Infosys for about four years.She has extensive experience in web and application development. While working in the Financial Services unit, she went on to lead a project on building an application from scratch to project monthly and quarterly revenues for the unit. Apart from handling the end to end process which included client requirement elicitation, planning, implementation and evaluation of the application, the project honed her leadership and communication skills. Her decision to pursue a career in public policy came from a deep interest to address issues which are more directly and closely associated with the larger public. As part of the Client Led Project, she worked with the Poverty and Human Development Monitoring Agency (PHDMA) of the Government of Odisha. Here, she reviewed Odisha’s Public Distribution System (PDS) using the analytical framework of Theory of Change. She also carried out primary data collection by interviewing various stakeholders like PDS beneficiaries, ration shop dealers and right to food activists, in addition to the secondary research for benchmarking the existing system against best global practices. Various projects and assignments as part of the coursework, drew her attention to India’s energy policy. To explore the sector further, she interned with Oorja Development Solutions Limited. She gained a better understanding of the renewable energy sector when she assisted a project consultant to strategize the expansion of Oorja’s solar irrigation and cooling services for small farmers in a new geographical location. In addition, she also collated and analyzed the data collected from the farmers’ focus group discussions. Currently, for her dissertation, she is working on understanding India’s energy poverty line through a geographical lens. Apart from the academic work, she takes deep interest in learning from competitions. She’s part of the three member team that won LokNiti, a public policy hackathon organized by the IIT, Kanpur in collaboration with Association for Democratic Reforms. Herein, the team proposed a novel model Caeser to address the transparency and accountability issues in the seizures of freebies during Indian elections. She’s also an elected member of the MPP Recruitment Coordination Committee where she has contributed to establishing new industry connections and works consistently to facilitate diverse internship and employment opportunities for her batchmates.