Alumni Feature | Neha Mallick, Master’s in Public Policy ‘16

Hailing from Cooch Behar, Neha held an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Calcutta before deciding to pursue her Masters in Public Policy at NLS. This would kick start her career in social impact projects through insightful interventions in governance systems. She believes the course and NLS opened up wonderful avenues of learning and praxis in the field of governance through its course work, thereby helping her to develop the skills to understand the policy ecosystem. The field exposure gained during her internships with Jeevika in Bihar, Majlis Legal Centre in Mumbai and National Human Rights Commission in Delhi, gave her the first hand understanding of ground realities and functioning of policies and state machineries around it. Her most cherished experience was her dissertation fieldwork in Arunachal Pradesh that fostered an urge to understand, evaluate and improve public service delivery for the last mile beneficiaries among tribal women. At NLS, she was also selected for the summer school program on Social Policy organised at Oslo and Akershus University College, funded by ESRC. After graduating from NLS, she headed the ‘Policy’ vertical at Swaniti Initiative. At Swaniti, she managed Parliamentary engagement and policy programs ranging from facilitating constituency level support for Members of Parliament to managing projects on child rights, labour rights and human trafficking. She was at the forefront of a number of policy engagement interventions in the fields of human trafficking and labour migration, and was instrumental in providing technical inputs to the Labour Standing Committee on the ‘The Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Condition Code, 2019.’ She believes that the blend of the extensive classroom sessions, debates among peers on policy tools, and field experience helped her understand the role of policy stakeholders at various levels of governance. Currently she works as Consultant- Project Manager with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Bihar. Here she is managing the Adolescence Education Programme for Madrasas in Bihar, and supervising the upscaling of a pilot intervention to 38 districts.