Alumni Feature | Mounik Lahiri, Master’s in Public Policy ‘16

Mounik currently works as a Senior Consultant with Deloitte. His formal training is in Economic Sciences, where he also had few years of relevant work experience. However, he also believed that the vast potential of the economic sciences in addressing some of the major developmental challenges in South Asia remain under utilised due to isolation and compartmentalization of the discipline. His search for a rigorous, multidisciplinary and theoretical approach made him pursue the MPP course at NLSIU, where he wanted to explore the dynamic forces at play in influencing developmental trajectories. For Mounik, courses like ‘Political Economy’, and others that made use of the ‘Actors, Ideas and Institutional’ paradigm, made him appreciate the reliance on reducing the dynamic, cultural and institutional factors impacting developmental outcomes. He also realised this through an exchange program to Norway, and then a fieldwork in rural Rajasthan. This allowed him to test the applicability of theoretical constructs in complex settings.

In his current role, he has authored the introductory chapter of the ‘Annual Status of Higher Education in India’ in response to the Draft New Education Policy that was released in 2016. He also formulated the Governance and Regulatory design for Bangalore Central University the same year. In 2017, as a member of the Drafting Committee for the Tamil Nadu Business Facilitation Policy, he played a crucial role in improving the Ease of Business rankings for the state, once it was legislated. His strategic policy inputs to the Government of Odisha to improve vocational skilling as a part of India’s economic corridor project to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, was later acted upon to institutionalise the next set of reforms. He was also a primary consultant to the World Bank and the Local Government Division in Bangladesh in 2018 & 2019 where he built local government capacity most notably improving the capacity to administer the RTI Act in the country. He was also the chief consultant to the Government of Bangladesh in the second half of 2019, to pilot one of the most rigorous CCT programmes in South Asia, targeting maternal health indicators. Finally, through his current assignment, he is realigning the Department of Agriculture of the Government of Maharashtra to improve remunerative prices for farmers at the last mile.