Alumni Feature | Pramiti Lonkar, Master’s in Public Policy ‘22

Born and raised in Faridabad, Pramiti had the opportunity to embrace multiple cultural strands while being brought up in a Kannadiga-Marathi family. While she became a policy student recently, economic policy has been a key area of interest through her years of education. Pramiti’s early years as a programme presenter for a children’s programme at All India Radio imbued an interest in journalism. After graduating with distinction in B.Com (Hons) from University of Delhi, she sought to combine her interest in finance with her penchant for storytelling. She completed her Masters in Convergent Journalism from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019. She then pursued a career in policy reporting for a leading financial news website, Moneycontrol as a policy reporter. During her stint at the organisation, she covered government policies on the infrastructure sector and MSMEs. Her work included analysis and reportage on the Union Budget 2019 and 2020. Reporting on macroeconomic policies and witnessing policymaking processes at close quarters inspired her to further engage with the field of public policy.

The course structure at NLSIU has helped her develop an interdisciplinary skill set to view policy problems, along with the theoretical grounding provided by the professors at the institute. As part of the Client Led Project, Pramiti worked as a policy rapporteur to help develop the credit and insurance section of New Agricultural Policy by the Government of Karnataka. Her work involved engaging with subject experts and government officials to understand best practices towards providing agricultural credit. She has interned with the Social Protection Initiative at Dvara Research. Her work involved designing tools for focus group discussions and interviews for the Health Savings Account (HSA) project. Her contribution and work ethic led to a longer engagement with the team, working on additional projects on analysis of density of Common Service Centers (CSCs), viability of payment banks in aiding financial inclusion, among others. Taking the learnings from the classroom, she participated in Cicero, the public policy event at IIM Indore along with her classmates and was a national finalist. Learnings from the course have further helped her sharpen interest areas in policy research, which includes public finance, credit and insurance. Her dissertation work aims at understanding the viability of digital financial services in improving growth prospects of MSMEs. As a policy researcher, she seeks to understand barriers to financial inclusion and explore alternative avenues for the Indian context.