I am a development economist and social scientist who has spent three decades asking questions that mainstream economics preferred to avoid — and is now beginning to ask more centrally — what do culture, narrative, and lived experience have to do with poverty, inequality, and social change? My answer — that they have everything to do with it — has shaped a body of work that bridges economics with anthropology, sociology, and political science, insisting on combining analytical rigor with deep engagement with how people actually experience their lives.
After more than two decades as a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group, I have moved into an independent phase of my career — as a scholar, writer, and teacher — working on questions that institutional constraints often made difficult to pursue. I am currently Roberta Buffett Distinguished Practitioner-Scholar in Residence at Northwestern University.
My early research helped open economics to topics then considered peripheral or unmeasurable: domestic violence, dowry practices, public celebrations, sex work, and price heterogeneity in village markets. This work demonstrated that rigorous empirical analysis and ethnographic depth were not in tension — that bringing them together produced better science and more honest accounts of social reality. My edited volume Culture and Public Action (2004), co-edited with Michael Walton, played a formative role in bringing culture, aspiration, and inequality traps into mainstream development debates.
Over time my focus shifted toward collective action, democratic participation, and the conditions under which ordinary people can actually reshape power relations rather than simply be consulted by them. Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?, co-authored with Ghazala Mansuri, is a widely cited synthesis of global evidence on participatory development. Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies, co-authored with Paromita Sanyal, examines how deliberation works — and fails — in practice, combining ethnographic depth with institutional analysis.
My forthcoming book, Revolution by Stealth: How Women’s Groups Catalyzed a Cultural Transformation in Bihar, co-authored with Shruti Majumdar and Paromita Sanyal, and forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2026, examines how Jeevika — a large-scale women’s Self-Help Group program in one of India’s poorest and most patriarchal states — produced rapid and durable shifts in gender relations. Drawing on four years of qualitative fieldwork across ten villages, the book traces the mechanisms through which collective organization transformed not just economic outcomes but cultural norms, women’s public authority, and the terms of social life itself. It is an argument, grounded in evidence, that culture is not a residual constraint on development but a site of political economy — one that can be deliberately, if carefully, reshaped.
As a practitioner, I have worked closely with governments, civil society organizations, and multilateral institutions on the design and evaluation of large-scale development programs. From 2010 to 2020, I led the World Bank’s Social Observatory, embedding researchers within implementation teams to enable adaptive learning and context-sensitive policy design — treating practice as a source of knowledge rather than simply a site of application.
My current work takes a new methodological direction. I am developing approaches that use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze large samples of qualitative data — thousands of open-ended interviews — to study aspirations, identity, and well-being in ways that neither standard survey methods nor conventional ethnography can achieve alone. This is both a technical contribution and a substantive argument: that social science has systematically undervalued what people say about their own lives, and that the tools now exist to take that seriously at scale.
My research spans India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Jamaica, and has been published in leading journals across economics, political science, sociology, and development studies. I hold a BA in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and have held academic appointments at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Williams College, and Brown University. I am a Fellow of the International Economic Association, Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging Program at CIFAR, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development.