Alumni Feature | R Jagannath, Master’s in Public Policy ‘17

Jagannath (Jagan), an alumnus of the 2017 batch, is a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) expert. Having worked with multiple government, private and non government stakeholders, he has helped build evidence on “what works”. Before the public policy program at NLSIU, Jagan completed his B.A. Economics from Loyola College, Chennai. He says, “one of the prime motivations to pursue a trans disciplinary program like MPP at NLSIU over a specialized master’s was to gain a well-rounded perspective of developmental challenges and wicked policy problems. The course design is a healthy interplay of law, economics, sociology and political economy, which exposes students to various aspects of the policy-making process.”

Jagan currently works as an M&E manager at Development Solutions Inc, a strategic and actionable consulting firm. Previously, he has worked as a Research Manager at Good Business lab and as a Senior Research Associate at LEAD at Krea University. He is presently a visiting faculty at NLSIU, where he teaches Policy Design, and Impact Evaluation and Monitoring courses. He has worked extensively with various policy departments across the country to test innovative solutions in curbing gender-based violence and with one of India’s largest garment manufacturing firms to test low-cost scalable solutions to improve worker wellbeing. “The MPP program at NLSIU has helped improve my understanding of the underlying political economy of the grassroots. While my work involves working with numbers, the skills acquired through the program have been useful in contextualizing and humanizing numbers”, says Jagan. He strongly believes that the program gives every student enough avenues to build expertise – be it subject matter or skill based. “The two years in the MPP program at NLSIU have had a long-lasting philosophical impact on me.”