I am delighted to share that I have graduated with a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), awarded with Merit, including Distinctions in Public Economics and in Fiscal Governance & Budgeting.
After more than four decades spanning public service and international development, this is one of the most meaningful milestones of my professional journey — but it is also, I hope, the beginning of the next one.
Why Return to the Classroom Now?
During my career, I had the privilege of serving in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, before spending more than two decades in senior international roles with the World Bank, GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), and DANIDA (Danish International Development Cooperation). Across these roles, I worked with governments across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe to strengthen public financial management, governance, and public investment systems.
Many friends and colleagues asked me a simple question: why pursue a master’s degree at this stage of a career?
My answer was equally simple. After four decades of implementing reforms around the world, I increasingly felt I wanted to contribute not only through practice, but also by advancing the body of knowledge that informs better public policy. I had spent much of my career helping governments implement reforms; I now wanted to understand more deeply why some reforms succeed, others falter, and how better evidence can improve public policy design.
Two Years at LSE
The past two years at LSE have been intellectually exhilarating. Beyond strengthening my understanding of public economics, fiscal governance, empirical methods, and policy analysis, the programme pushed me to engage with subjects well beyond my day-to-day professional experience — from electoral systems and political institutions to development policy, taxation, artificial intelligence, and evidence-based policymaking.
It was a rare opportunity: to step back from decades of operational work and examine, with academic rigour, the questions that practice alone had never quite let me answer.
After graduation, I travelled to the Scottish Highlands with my family. Away from the ceremony, with time to pause and reflect, the significance of the journey truly began to sink in — not just the degree, but everything it represents about how I want to spend the years ahead.
The Next Milestone: A PhD at Manchester
This graduation marks the completion of the first milestone in a larger journey. In September, I begin a PhD in Development Studies (Development Economics track) at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute, supervised by Professor Kunal Sen.
My doctoral research will examine why public capital investment so often under-delivers relative to what is budgeted in developing countries — a question drawn directly from three decades of diagnosing capital budget execution failures at the World Bank, GIZ, and in government, using Indonesia and India/Uttar Pradesh as comparative cases. It is, in many ways, the natural next step from a career spent implementing reforms toward one spent rigorously interrogating why some reforms take hold and others don’t.
The road ahead is still long. But today, I am grateful for the journey so far, and genuinely excited for the one that lies ahead.
