MA Public Policy and Law
CGPA 7.6/10 to date. Econometrics, impact evaluation, development data analysis, regulatory governance.
Public policy · research · strategy
Suhani Bhatia
Where policy meets the person it is supposed to serve.
Public programmes rarely fail at the point where they are written. Their difficulties emerge later, in the ordinary transactions through which a person is expected to claim what the state has already promised: a form completed correctly, a document produced on time, an official willing to explain the next step, a payment that arrives in the account it was meant to reach. My work has increasingly been concerned with this space between policy as it is designed and policy as it is encountered. I study the institutions, incentives and everyday frictions that determine what survives that journey.
Mumbai, IndiaMA Public Policy and Law, TISSAvailable full-time from December 2026Open to relocation across India
Evidence
From the record
Introduction
How the work holds together
Over the last several years the work has moved between villages, a Block Development Officer’s office, a police protection cell, published survey tables, a philanthropic strategy problem, and a tuition centre I ran myself. The subjects have included pensions, MGNREGA, rural public services, women’s agency, transgender rights, urban migrant welfare and labour-market attrition. The settings have changed. Many of the questions have not. They return to a practical problem: what happens between an intervention as it is designed and the person who has to live with its consequences?
Sometimes that question is qualitative. Fourteen interviews for Transform Rural India asked why a district service reaches one community and not the next. Two villages with Sanchay followed a pension through the last mile of paperwork. At Pride Place, inside the Telangana Police, a rights statute had to survive intake. Sometimes the question is quantitative: whether financial inclusion, as NFHS records it, travels with the thin measures of agency the same survey also records. Sometimes it is strategic: how a donor might spend a finite grant so that a migrant receives a benefit at the counter. Sometimes it is operational: whether a classroom still exists on a Tuesday because the fee was priced so that a household could continue.
Gender, social protection, rural development and policing institutions are the fields in which those methods have had to earn their keep. I write so that an officer, an editor or a colleague who has to decide can use the result. The archive below is organised by that work.
Selected work
A body of work gathered over several years
Professional assignments sit first. Independent research, strategy and technical work follow. Each piece is labelled for what it is: work done for an organisation, analysis done independently, or a demonstration on synthetic data.
Professional research · Telangana State Police · 2026
When a rights law meets a police station
How the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 is supposed to travel through a protection cell, and where that journey depends on ordinary police administration.
Read →Professional research · Transform Rural India · 2025–present
Why a public service reaches one community and not another
Fourteen interviews across six states with SHG members, panchayat representatives and practitioners, asking why district services arrive unevenly.
Read →Professional research · 2023–24
Pensions at the last mile
Two villages, a Block Development Officer’s office, and the ordinary barriers between a listed pensioner and a payment.
Read →Quantitative analysis · 2025
Why workers leave
A method for looking at attrition in Tier 2 and Tier 3 labour markets. The funnel uses synthetic data. The professional assignment at VIP Industries is described without confidential figures.
Read →Technical work · 2026
A phone the welfare system assumes
OTP, e-KYC and portability all presume a woman can be reached on a phone she herself uses. In several Phase-II states, own-use bank accounts are far ahead of own-use phones.
Read →- 2026Accounts moved. Paid work did not keep pace.Quantitative analysis
- 2023–24Welfare information at the SHGProgramme design
- 2025Documenting a rural livelihoods programmeProgramme design
- 2022–23Partnerships that grow a pipelineOperations
- 2026How would we know assisted access worked?Strategy · evaluation
- 2026Why eligible people do not claimIndependent research
Technical work · 2026
What ₹5 crore can and cannot buy
An auditable cost and coverage model for assisted migrant welfare access: population, enrolment, successful receipt, staffing, and three scenarios.
Read →Technical work · 2026
A small tool for keeping sources honest
A working evidence matrix: question, source, method, finding, confidence, implication. Built to be used, not demonstrated.
Read →Technical work · 2026
From a public table to a usable file
A Python and SQL workflow: reading published NFHS factsheet totals, checking them, joining them, and producing a policy-ready extract.
Read →Capability
Where each kind of work lives
- Operations
- Green Apple AcademyAIESEC partnerships
- Communication
- Village SquareIndia Rural ColloquyRural Renaissance
Writing
Published work
Village Square is where field notes have to become readable. The op-ed with Prof. Namrata Chindarkar is where the NFHS work is trying to become an argument about monitoring. The full list lives in the writing archive.
- Village Square · June 2025
From ruins to revival: can Chettinad mansions anchor rural futures?
The houses employed carpenters, masons, tile-makers. They funded temples, tanks, schools. Whether they can be saved is a question about a rural economy, not only about heritage.
- Village Square · April 2025
People’s movements to save the forests: a timeline
A stay on 400 acres in Hyderabad sits inside a longer Indian argument about who a forest is for.
- Village Square · May 2025
Rural India’s cricket fantasies come alive virtually
Chai shops as war rooms, and a one-rupee contest that can also take a week’s money. Reported from a position of not being a cricket person.
- Op-ed in progress, with Prof. Namrata Chindarkar, IIM Ahmedabad · 2026
Why measures of women’s agency are absent from Indian scheme monitoring
The NFHS analysis on this site is the empirical companion to that argument.
Speaking and conversations
India Rural Colloquy and Rural Renaissance
In 2025 I emceed Day 2 of the Delhi chapter of the India Rural Colloquy, and recorded conversations for TRI’s Rural Renaissance series. The speaking page describes that work without inflating it. Photographs from those rooms are not published here.
Methods
How a question is taken apart
Semi-structured interviews. Case files and circulars. Implementation maps. NFHS tables. Excel models. Stata at the scale of published factsheets and coursework regression. Python and SQL used to clean and join public tables. Spatial reading of state indicators. Decks for people who have to decide. The methods essay describes the practice in full.
Education
TISS, then the earlier degrees
BBA
GPA 8.0/10.
BA Psychology
Progression
Where the work sat, in order
- 2018 – 2023Green Apple Academy
Delhi - 2022 – 2023AIESEC in Delhi IIT
Partnerships - 2023 – 2024Sanchay
Two villages - 2025VIP Industries
HR intern, attrition - 2025 – presentTransform Rural India / Village Square
Consultant - 2025 – 2027TISS Mumbai
MA Public Policy and Law - 2026Telangana State Police, Pride Place
Research intern
Questions
Questions I keep returning to
- What happens after a policy is passed, in the office that has to implement it?
- Who bears the cost, in time and dignity, of accessing a public service?
- When does access become agency, and when does it remain a name on a list?
- Why do programmes written as universal produce such different ordinary lives?
Availability
Some questions are worth spending time on
I am interested in work that requires research to lead somewhere concrete, whether that means understanding a delivery problem, evaluating an intervention, or helping an institution make a difficult decision. Interested in strategy, public-sector advisory, policy research, development and implementation work. Available full-time from December 2026. Mumbai, India. Open to relocation across India.