Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowships Archives

Ashish Tiwari

Ashish Tiwari graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, West Bengal with a BTech and MTech in computer science and engineering in 2007. A 2012 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre, Ashish has held positions of ASP Jhansi, SP rural Varanasi, SP Mirzapur, SSP Etah, SP Jaunpur, SSP Ayodhya, Founder Commandant-Special Security Force (SSF), SP Election (Uttar Pradesh), and SSP Firozabad. He was recognized as one of the 40 promising global leaders in policing by the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police, U.S.A.), who mentioned him in their ‘40 under 40’ list in 2022. He also received the Young Alumni Achiever award from IIT Kharagpur.

Ashish is passionate about SMART (simple and sensitive, moral and modern, accountable, reliable and responsive, trained and technical) policing. He believes in technology, innovations, and entrepreneurial government with a people-centric approach. He has launched multiple technology initiatives to realize SMART policing, which have been institutionalized at the state level and have impacted millions of citizens. He is also a member of various committees, and has been a keynote speaker at many conferences on modernizing policing using technology. To empower women, Ashish has constituted a ‘green group’ of rural women to fight problems of drugs, alcohol, gambling, and domestic violence in various districts. Leveraging technology, under ‘Operation Smile’ in west Uttar Pradesh, Ashish has reunited hundreds of missing children and victims of child trafficking with their families. His innovative strategies in community policing, countering fake news, and digital governance have received public and professional appreciation and widespread media coverage. Ashish has received numerous accolades, including the FICCI smart police officer award, the SKOCH award, the gFiles governance award, triple DGP Commendation (silver, gold, and platinum) discs, and the State Award for Best Electoral Practices.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Ashish is engaged in developing innovative solutions for smart governance and smart policing at the intersection of technology, security, and development. He intends to work at both the federal and the state level to apply new technologies in security and governance.

Utsav Shukla

Utsav Shukla, a civil servant of the Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS), works at the intersection of railroad network planning, operations, regional development and urban transport. He has been working for 10 years in northeast India, connecting habitations and nurturing opportunities for improving the living conditions of millions. Hailing from Varanasi, the spiritual center of India, and trained as a medical doctor at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College, Indore, Utsav has been instrumental in designing people-centric infrastructure, sustainably dovetailing into the eco-sensitive milieu of the region.

Over the last decade, he has headed operations and business verticals, providing policy inputs on freight rebates and cargo aggregation, giving small agro-producers of the region access to national and international markets. He was pivotal in planning, coordinating and executing rail connectivity projects to Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland. For the safe and successful operations of 232 Shramik specials (trains carrying stranded people) while resuscitating the supply chain of life-saving drugs and essential commodities in six northeastern states during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was awarded the National Railway Award 2021, the highest honor for any railway servant by the Minister of Railways, Government of India.

In his latest assignment at the Northeast Frontier Railway’s headquarters in Guwahati, Utsav influenced the operationalization of international connectivity links with Bangladesh and Nepal. Further, his commitment to wildlife conservation and sustainable development has institutionalized effective mitigation mechanisms along the elephant corridors in northeast India, reducing elephant deaths by 60%. Anchoring station redevelopment projects in Guwahati and New Jalpaiguri under the Amrit Bharat scheme, he is currently working on integrating the passenger and freight railway transit nodes with the urban transportation system.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Utsav is studying urban planning to gain insights into policies, technologies and institutions which can make cities more humane, livable and equitable. He intends to explore leadership roles and reforms in governance to bring about citizen engagement in delivering urban services.

Disha Wadekar

Ms. Disha Wadekar is an independent advocate practicing before the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts in India. Her practice focuses on representing marginalized communities on matters pertaining to constitutional law and anti-discrimination law. She has worked on many constitution bench matters, including the famous Sabarimala temple entry case and the economically weaker section (EWS) reservation case. In 2022, she was appointed the Assistant Special Public Prosecutor by the Government of Rajasthan.

An engineer-turned-lawyer, Ms. Wadekar completed her undergraduate law degree from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Pune. She has taught courses on law and marginalization at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and National Law University, Delhi, and has delivered lectures at various institutions. She is also a member of the academic committee on Denotified Tribes at SPPU, Pune, and of the research ethics committee at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS), Delhi.

In 2021, Ms. Wadekar co-founded Community for the Eradication of Discrimination in Education and Employment (CEDE)—an organization working towards a diverse and inclusive Indian legal profession and the judiciary. She has also provided consultancy to organizations, such as the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi. Her work has been published by reputed journals and online portals.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellowship, Ms. Wadekar is pursuing LLM from Columbia University. She hopes to learn about the feminist, indigenous, and critical race critiques of the justice system. She believes her fellowship will enable her to contribute to litigation, research, and advocacy interventions that foreground rights-based anti-caste and intersectional perspectives in the Indian justice system.

Vidya Viswanathan

Ms. Vidya Viswanathan is an environmental policy researcher. She consults with multiple state agencies and NGOs as a domain expert. Currently, she is working with Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research (SAFAR) leading their national initiative of building accountability and transparency for common resource governance. In the past, she led the Environmental Justice Program at the Center for Policy Research (CPR), a leading policy think tank in Delhi. Ms. Viswanathan was CPR’s youngest Program Director. Under her leadership, the program restored common resources through improved regulatory compliance, thereby protecting farmlands and water bodies from industrial contamination in over 150 energy and infrastructure projects. She has also worked with the government through her engagement with the Ministries of Labor and Employment and of Rural Development.

Ms. Viswanathan is the co-author of several articles and papers that discuss the efficacy of environmental regulations in protecting ecology and managing social conflicts induced by land use changes on the ground. Her research interests include methods of strengthening environmental governance, including regulations, with a focus on building better and collaborative interfaces between citizens and regulators to promote India’s ecological security.

Ms. Viswanathan graduated top of her class and received numerous awards for her academic and non-academic achievements at the postgraduate level. She holds a Master of Arts in social work with a specialization in community organization and development practice from the prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Delhi.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, Ms. Viswanathan aims to acquire specialized skills in policymaking and soft skills of leadership and advocacy. She is excited about experiential learning from a diverse and accomplished cohort that will help her refine the pathways of documenting, articulating, and building compelling insights from the grassroots into environmental policy design.

Chanchal Yadav

Ms. Chanchal Yadav, an Indian Administrative Service officer, belongs to the 2008 batch of the Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram, and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre. A postgraduate in political science from the University of Delhi, she is known for her innovations in public service delivery systems. She has diverse experience working in various capacities in the Union Territory of Daman, the border state of Arunachal Pradesh, the capital city of Delhi and the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.

As Secretary, New Delhi Municipal Council, she brought substantial improvement in civic services delivery, leveraging technology. She successfully steered the organization towards becoming the first municipal body in country to go cashless. Her concerted efforts towards the cleanliness of the city resulted in NDMC becoming the first Open Defecation Free (ODF) urban local body of Delhi; the organization continuously remained amongst the top cities in the Swachh Sarvekshans by the Government of India.

Under her leadership, the district administration of Changlang more than doubled its annual revenue collection, successfully rolled out livelihood missions and registered a steady decline in insurgency-related incidents. She was conferred the Governor’s Gold Medal for her meritorious public service. As Special Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor, Delhi, she effectively coordinated with agencies responsible for the civic administration of the capital and contributed to the drafting of Delhi’s Master Plan Document 2041.

Ms. Yadav is passionate about urban governance and as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, she aims to gain specialization in the sector and orient her civil services career around it. She loves to be in nature and gardening is her favorite hobby.

Rajan Vishal

Mr. Rajan Vishal worked in the Reserve Bank of India after receiving his Master of Business Economics degree from the University of Delhi in 2005. Driven by his commitment to improve public service delivery at the cutting-edge level, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 2008. He received the gold medal for the best study in rural development from the National Academy of Administration.

He has worked as District Collector in four districts for more than six years. As an administrator, he has worked in insurgency affected and the least developed areas of the country, implementing welfare programs, steering government campaigns for the marginalized and managing relief programs during natural calamities. He was awarded the Best Electoral Practices Award by the Election Commission of India in 2015, for increasing female voter turnout in Parliamentary Elections 2014 by 25 percent in Jalore District, with women from some villages having voted for the first time.

He also has experience in policy formulation in the health, cooperative, urban development, and finance sectors. He has played an important role in the formulation of impactful policies that have improved nutrition and health, strengthened the legal rights of women, empowering them as decision makers in Rajasthan.

A graduate program in public administration from a U.S. university will provide Mr. Vishal with the skills, knowledge, networking, and approaches needed to design potent policies to address the complex developmental challenges facing India. After completing the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, he would work on a range of issues: health, public finance management and women empowerment.

Pragyan Srivastava

Ms. Pragyan Srivastava is the founder of Chalat Musafir – India’s first travel journalism media house. She initially ideated a multimedia platform bringing together travel writers, photographers, video bloggers, historians, cultural artists and experts to create high quality, high impact, culturally rooted, undiscovered stories of India. She bootstrapped funds to on-board 10 partners (3 Directors, 7+ colleagues) & over a thousand contributors, and set-up a website. She established a unique & thriving community with over a million followers across 3 social media streams, traveled across and stayed in all states of India to capture the real essence of her culture, and forge partnerships with socio-cultural-political leaders, curating over ten thousand impact driven, convergent stories covering topics across domains.

Chalat Musafir has curated original travel and exploration related content, with a sharp focus on frugal travel especially for women, spurring an increased interest among domestic women travelers leading to over fifty percent of stories being contributed by them. Additionally, her team has been redefining the role of travel in journalism through covering impactful, socially relevant stories of change-makers. They also successfully recommended Dr. Yogi Aeron, a philanthropic surgeon from rural Himalayas for the Padma Shree award, the fourth highest civilian award in India; the story catalyzed a lot of public interest in his endeavor of over ten thousand surgeries.

Ms. Srivastava has pursued a postgraduate diploma at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). She has more than seven years of experience working in Indian media. A Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship would allow her to learn from and emulate the bold and transformational work of trailblazing U.S. journalists like Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohay and build an ecosystem of next generation journalists across India and the US who would enrich democracies by giving purpose to and building bridges among diverse people across the world.

Garima Shekhar

Ms. Garima Shekhar is the founder of Evolving Being, a liberal arts-focused admissions consultancy (www.evolvingbeing.org). TechnoServe India, in partnership with the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, selected her amongst the top 30 women entrepreneurs for an Accelerator Program in 2021.

In the past, she was a core member of the Founding Projects team that launched the undergraduate batch of Ashoka University, a pioneering Indian liberal arts and sciences university in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and Stanford University among others. She was on the interview panel, along with the founders and faculty of the university, to shortlist students for the undergraduate and postgraduate program, Young India Fellowship. She has also offered consultancy to the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU). She has traveled extensively, met students from different walks of life, and discovered the transformative power of quality education.

Ms. Shekhar has studied Economics at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. She received full scholarship to pursue the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University. At Welham Girls’ School, she scored the highest aggregate marks in grade XII and received several accolades: Academic Excellence Award by the Governor of Uttarakhand, the Khandelwal Shield for the Highest Aggregate, and the Faculty Trophy for Sustained Academic Excellence. When she gets time off work, she enjoys going on long treks, doing yoga, and learning new languages.

Through a graduate program in Education Leadership, Organization, and Entrepreneurship as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, she hopes to support students around the globe in achieving their higher education goals.

Manasi Sahay Thakur

Ms. Manasi Sahay Thakur is an Indian Administrative Service officer with close to 13 years of experience. She is a mechanical engineer from the College of Engineering in Pune. After a brief stint in the private sector, she joined the Indian Administrative Services in 2009.

As Deputy Commissioner of Bilaspur, she successfully led a campaign against female feticide. She conceptualized and coordinated Muskan, an animated film on girl child rights, which has had over a million views on YouTube and has received awards and recognition at different international forums. Ms. Thakur also led a nine-day long rescue operation for rescuing trapped laborer in an under-construction tunnel in Bilaspur.

As Director, Women and Child Development, she was instrumental in drafting the first legislation in India dealing with the sensitive issue of early childhood care and education. She also functionalized the first One Stop Centre in Himachal Pradesh for women in distress.

As Director, Energy, Ms. Thakur helped improve the state’s revenue realization through power sale, spearheaded efforts for energy efficiency and successfully worked on policies to revitalize the dormant hydro sector. She has co-authored “The Power Tariff Case-A Tale of Two States” which is being used by the National Academy of Administration for training civil servants in Negotiation Strategy. She ensured steady supply chain of essential commodities during the Covid-19 lockdown and was also responsible for the safe transportation and evacuation of stranded migrants from Himachal Pradesh in Maharashtra and Goa.

By pursuing a master’s in public administration as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s fellow, she aims to hone her policy making skills and better understand evidence-based decision making. She aspires to learn about global best practices along with leveraging of data and technology to become a more impactful professional and meaningful contributor back home.

Payoshi Roy

Ms. Payoshi Roy has practiced as a criminal defense lawyer since graduating from National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2015. Her practice focuses on representing prisoners on death row and indigent persons sentenced to life imprisonment before the Supreme Court of India and the Bombay High Court. In defending activists and terror accused, she has contested state excesses and abuse of anti-terror legislations in India. She also represents victims in custodial death cases challenging police impunity to ensure prosecution of police officers. Outside of courts, she has taught courses on capital punishment and criminal law in law schools across India.

Through her master’s in law as a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, Ms. Roy is undertaking comparative interdisciplinary research on sentencing, abuse of anti-terror laws, and institutional reform.