Alumni Feature | Anmol Narain, Master’s in Public Policy ‘17

The intersection of Human Development, Multidimensional Poverty and Behavioral Science has always fascinated Anmol, and has been the focus of her work since obtaining the MPP at NLSIU in 2017. She is interested in furthering the cause of evidence based policy making in the country by serving within government structures as a lateral entrant. She currently serves as the Monitoring & Evaluation Lead at the Development, Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) at NITI Aayog in Delhi. As an M&E Lead, she contributes to projects pertaining to the Government of India’s data quality infrastructure to aid transparent and accountable mechanisms for evidence based decision making for national development priorities. Prior to this, she served on deputation at the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India to contribute to National Covid-19 response strategy, provide key insights to improve the implementation of Centrally Sponsored Schemes, and contribute to the creation of a national strategy to improve India’s performance on Global Indices pertaining to Governance, Human Development, Industry and the Economy. Her work at Cabinet Secretariat manifested as recommendations to Ministries for reforms in the implementation of schemes, and the creation of an institutional structure to monitor India’s performance on metrics linked to global indices for growth involving all central ministries and state governments.

Before her deputation to the Cabinet Secretariat, she served as a Young Professional as part of the core team for the Aspirational Districts Programme (ADP). The first data driven development programme of its kind in the country ADP involves 112 of India’s districts that have historically lagged on key indicators of human development, while promoting cooperative and competitive federalism by enabling collaboration as well as healthy competition between district administrations and ministries. Before becoming a lateral entrant, she contributed to quality control processes for six randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of behaviour change interventions on outcomes in the Water-Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector as a research assistant at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) where she also got the opportunity to co-author a paper which developed a tool to critically appraise the interaction of qualitative and quantitative evidence in Mixed-Methods Impact Evaluations and Systematic Reviews. Transitioning from academically oriented research spaces to government systems has been a journey of continuous learning and adaptation. The MPP program at NLSIU helped nurture Anmol’s intention to build a career in public policy and hone her academic strengths ranging from analysis to presentation. The free spirit of interdisciplinary research at the MPP program helped her look beyond the bounds of monochromatic approaches to inquiry and build on her undergraduate studies in psychology in linking policy to behavioural science. The experience of studying at NLSIU has been incredibly enriching for her, not just as a consequence of professors that inspired students to be better every day but also due to a network of students and peers which helped stimulate ever-enriching dialogue and conversations under pink Bangalore skies.