NITI Aayog, Economics and Finance Vertical
Policy research on state fiscal performance, logistics competitiveness, and external-sector decomposition for India's principal public-policy think tank.
This experience centered on high-stakes policy research within the Economics and Finance Vertical at NITI Aayog, where the work spanned state-level fiscal benchmarking, logistics competitiveness, and external-sector analysis. The role required moving fluidly between quantitative ranking methodology, policy writing, and macroeconomic interpretation, with outputs designed to inform public-sector decision-making rather than remain purely academic.
One major project redesigned fiscal performance rankings for all 28 Indian states using Wroclaw taxonomy, replacing simpler comparative frameworks with a more rigorous multi-criteria structure. This produced a more defensible comparative ranking architecture and sharpened how cross-state performance differences were interpreted in a policy setting.
I also authored a 15-page logistics benchmarking report identifying five global best practices and linking them to India's transport-cost problem. The analysis was designed not merely to summarize international examples, but to translate them into actionable policy insight, ultimately contributing to directives aimed at reducing transport costs by 9 percent.
On the macro side, I performed granular trend decomposition for the External Sector chapter of Economic Survey 2024, isolating the structural drivers behind 12 percent year-over-year export growth and subjecting those findings to robustness checks. This work required distinguishing cyclical movement from deeper sectoral or compositional change, which is essential when policy conclusions are being drawn from aggregate macro data.