Dr Tarun Arora

A researcher with a demonstrated history of working in the development space. Dr Tarun Arora is skilled in Project Management, Monitoring and Evaluation, Policy Analysis, and Quantitative research methods. He completed his doctoral studies in Economics from Institute of Social and Economic Change and joined Janaagraha in the year 2016. At Janaagraha, among many other projects that he headed one of the projects closest to him was the Jana Brown-Citizenship Index project which is a collaboration between Janaagraha and Brown University, USA. The project’s aim was to evaluate the quality of citizenship in urban centres through the lens of knowledge, participation, and engagement and estimate its impact on the quality of public service delivery. He has widely published in the area of urban governance, voter list management, civic learning, trade competitiveness, and Industrial economics. At present, Dr. Tarun Arora is Associate Professor, Economics at Department of Professional Studies of Christ (deemed-to-be) University, Bengaluru.  

 Dr Reetika Syal

Dr Reetika Syal is a Senior Fellow (Governance and Education) at CPPR. She is currently working as an independent consultant with Janaagraha. She was Senior Officer, Research at CPPR from October 2021 to June 2022. She has a PhD 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.

Ms Meenuka Mathew

Meenuka Mathew is a Senior Research Fellow at the Jindal School of Government & Public Policy (JSGP). She has a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities from Aquinas University, Colombo, Sri Lanka and a Master’s degree in Public Policy from O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India. Her research focuses on refugee economies, transnational migrants, Public Health, and Policy Design Evaluation and Communication. She has extensively travelled and worked for International Non-Governmental organisations based in the Philippines, France, and Uganda. In Sri Lanka, she has worked in areas of programme design & evaluation. Her professional experience is mainly in programme design, teaching & research. She is currently the assistant editor of Jindal Journal of Public Policy. At JSGP, she works on research on Gulf migrants of India, Refugee economies in South Asia and COVID-19 & the Indian middle class. She is currently the Asst. Editor of Jindal Journal of Public Policy. She also coordinates the NIHR Health Financing Fragmentation study in India in collaboration with Imperial College, London and JGU. In 2019, She co-founded Policy Talks which focuses on Public Policy Education for school students.