Dr Reetika Syal is a Senior Fellow (Governance and Education) at CPPR. She is an independent consultant, currently residing in Bangalore. She was Senior Officer, Research at CPPR from October 2021 to June 2022. She has a Ph.D in Political Science from Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, and was Assistant Professor at JAIN (Deemed-to-be) University, Bangalore, for more than 8 years, before joining CPPR. She has also worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands and IIT- Delhi in 2018-19, on a project on Civil Society Advocacy with her research focusing on State-Civil Society Relations in Disaster Management in India. She is a part of the Lokniti Network, Delhi, and has been a part of various elections and democracy-related studies, along with being a resource person for Lokniti’s Annual Summer School on Quantitative Data Analysis for more than a decade. Dr. Syal has extensive experience in conducting qualitative and quantitative studies including large sample opinion surveys in India on Elections and Democracy, Governance, Elementary and Higher Education, and has presented papers at many international and national conferences, along with publishing in journals and edited books. She was the International Consultant for Nepal Governance Survey, a study by the Nepal Planning Commission in 2017.