Learn from the world’s best people

A K Shiva Kumar is one of India's foremost development economists, whose doctoral work at Harvard was supervised by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, and whose research has shaped national policy on poverty, health, nutrition, and the rights of women and children. He has advised UNICEF India, served on India's National Advisory Council, and contributed to human development reports across Bhutan, Mongolia, Myanmar, and Serbia, among others.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in human development, social sector economics, and public policy. Fellows can expect a mentor who has spent four decades translating rigorous economic thinking into policies that reach the most vulnerable — exactly the kind of work that many Pravaha fellows may want to build careers around.

Dr Punita Kumar-Sinha is a global investment professional with over three decades of experience in emerging and international markets, who led Blackstone Asia Advisors as Senior Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer and earlier managed the NYSE-listed India Fund for fifteen years at Oppenheimer. A CFA Charter holder and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she sits on the Board of Governors of the CFA Institute.

At Pravaha, she will teach courses in investment management, equity markets, and emerging market finance — drawing on one of the deepest careers in Indian institutional investing. Fellows can expect a practitioner who has seen Indian capital markets evolve from their earliest foreign investment phase and can mentor them on how financial markets work in practice, from portfolio construction to board-level governance.

Dr Santosh Kumar Gautam is Professor of Development and Global Health Economics at Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs, where he also directs the university's Sustainable Development doctoral programme. His prior work as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington gives him a grounded, empirical approach to how policy shapes human outcomes.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in development economics, global health economics, and the economics of public policy — drawing on fieldwork he has conducted with Bihar's Education and Health Departments. Fellows can expect mentorship rooted in evidence and field experience — guidance on how to ask the right questions about development, and how to build careers that actually move the needle.

Born and raised in Bihar, Nishith Prakash is a Dean’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy with a joint appointment with the Department of Economics and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. His research focuses on government policy and inclusive growth in low-income countries — with a particular focus on education, gender, and the economics of inequality — and who has worked directly with Bihar's Education Department, Health Department, and State Police on field research. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale, Columbia, MIT, and Harvard Kennedy School.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in development economics, public policy, and applied econometrics. For fellows interested in understanding the forces that shape Bihar and states like it — and building careers that can change those forces — he is a mentor who has spent his career doing exactly that, from the inside.

Dr Prachi Mishra is the Dean of Ashoka University's School of Economics and Finance and directs its Isaac Centre for Public Policy. She holds a PhD in Economics from Columbia University. Her previous work includes senior roles at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Goldman Sachs, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), as well as advisory positions at India's Ministry of Finance and the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council.

At Pravaha, she will teach courses spanning financial markets, monetary policy, and international macroeconomics. Pravaha Fellows will learn how organisations such as the IMF and RBI operate and how their decisions impact business decisions and everyday lives.

Dr Isabel Salovaara is an anthropologist at Stanford University whose doctoral research was conducted in Patna, Bihar — specifically inside coaching institutes that train young people for government job examinations — examining how aspiration, gender, and caste play out in the lives of young people navigating India's vast exam preparation economy. She holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge and has previously taught at OP Jindal Global University.

At Pravaha, she will teach courses on critical thinking with AI and research methodology. For fellows who have themselves grown up inside the world she has spent years studying, she offers a rare mirror — a mentor who can help them understand and articulate the structural forces that shaped their own journeys.

Vinay Singh is a physicist-turned-finance professional whose career traces a rare arc — from an MS in Physics at IIT Kanpur and a PhD in Physics at Yale, through an MBA at Cornell Johnson, and into over two decades of quantitative research in investment management, most recently as Senior Quantitative Researcher at QR Alpha and Lead Data Scientist at SAIC. He has been Adjunct Associate Faculty at Columbia University since 2020, teaching quantitative research methods alongside his industry work.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in quantitative methods, data modelling, and the application of analytical thinking to financial and business problems. Fellows can expect a mentor who has spent his career showing that the most rigorous training in hard science is also among the most powerful tools available in finance and data-driven decision making.

Dr Saumya Sindhwani is an award-winning teacher and strategy scholar whose research sits at the intersection of corporate strategy, leadership, and society, with a particular focus on how organisations navigate uncertainty and on the role of women as economic change agents — topics on which she has authored two books. She has taught at the Indian School of Business, Singapore Management University, and Lancaster University, and has contributed to executive programmes for organisations including Google, Goldman Sachs, and Walmart.

At Pravaha, she will teach courses in business strategy, organisational behaviour, and leadership. Fellows can expect a mentor who combines intellectual depth with practical clarity, and who has spent her career helping young leaders understand the systems they are entering — and how to shape them.

Dr Bibek Banerjee is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at Ashoka University with a three-decade academic career anchored at IIM Ahmedabad, where he was Chair of the Marketing Area and co-founded the Centre for Research in Retailing, and where he was among the first Indian management academics to introduce digital simulations into the curriculum. His leadership development work has reached organisations from Ericsson and Coca-Cola to the Tata Group and HDFC Bank.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in entrepreneurship, marketing strategy, and management — helping fellows understand how organisations are built, led, and sustained. Fellows can expect a mentor who has built institutions himself — from founding collaborative programmes between IIM-A and Duke to launching new schools of management — and who brings that institution-builder's perspective directly into the classroom.

Jaspreet Bindra is India's leading practitioner on AI literacy and digital transformation, having led digital strategy as Group Chief Digital Officer at Mahindra Group and Regional Director at Microsoft India before founding AI&Beyond — a global AI literacy initiative running bootcamps for organisations across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He teaches at Ashoka University, Harvard Business, and Singularity University, and has authored two widely read books on AI and technology for non-specialist audiences.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in AI literacy, digital transformation, and the ethics and future of work in an AI-driven economy. Fellows can expect a mentor who has made it his life's work to make these subjects accessible to people without technical backgrounds — exactly what the next generation of leaders from Bihar's first globally-benchmarked institution will need.

Seema Chowdhry directs the Centre for Learning and Teaching Excellence at ISB, where she leads the school's work on pedagogy, learning science, and faculty development, and was previously Vice President of Curriculum Design at Harappa Education where she built a core curriculum of 25 courses. Before entering education, she was an editor at Mint and Lounge for over a decade, and earlier at Femina and Cosmopolitan, giving her an unusual dual expertise in how ideas are made rigorous and how they are made legible.

At Pravaha, she will teach courses on communication, media and public policy, and how learning is designed and delivered. Fellows can expect a mentor who is as invested in how they learn as in what they learn, and who brings both journalistic sharpness and academic rigour to her teaching.

Somak Ghoshal is a Rhodes Scholar and one of India's most respected cultural critics, with over two decades of writing on art, books, society, and human rights across Mint, HuffPost India, Caravan, and other publications, and earlier as a commissioning editor at Penguin Books India. He now teaches at BITS School of Management and Harappa Education alongside his ongoing journalism.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in writing, effective communication, and reading culture — the skills that allow professionals in any field to think more clearly, write more precisely, and engage more meaningfully with the world around them. Fellows can expect a mentor who believes that being able to write and communicate well is not a soft skill but a core one, and who has built his own career proving it.

Siddarth Menon is a marketing and brand-building professional with over two decades of experience across India's most recognised consumer companies, most recently as CMO of Epigamia where he led integrated brand strategy across the company's growing product portfolio, and before that at Colgate-Palmolive where he drove market share growth as head of the North business. He now teaches at Masters' Union and Harappa Education alongside independent consulting work.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in brand strategy, consumer marketing, and how to build successful businesses — grounding theory in the real decisions behind some of India's best-known consumer brands. Fellows will gain a mentor who works from lived market experience, teaching them how brands are built from the inside rather than from a textbook.

Pallavi Dhody is a brand and marketing strategist and former ed-tech founder with over two decades of experience building distinctive brands and go-to-market narratives across K–12 education, SaaS, and complex B2B businesses. She is the founder of Draftt, a brand and content studio, and Senior Advisor for Brand & Marketing at Jetri. Previously, she founded and led the teacher-skilling company Highr and served as Senior Director of Growth & Marketing at Toddle. 

At Pravaha, she will teach brand and marketing through the real choices businesses make: how they find a distinctive position, understand their audiences, shape a compelling story, and take it to market. Fellows will learn to see branding not as a layer of polish, but as a strategic tool for building relevance, trust, and growth.

Neeraj Prasad is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam, whose research on elections, democratic resilience, and political entrepreneurship has appeared in The Journal of Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and Electoral Studies — work informed by earlier research positions at the World Bank's Development Research Group and the Indian School of Business. He teaches political economy, comparative politics, and the political economy of identity at Amsterdam, and as a Fellow at Good Authority, writes regularly on Indian elections, political violence, and party competition for broader public audiences.

At Pravaha, he will teach courses in political economy, democratic governance, and Indian politics, drawing on research that treats India's most politically dynamic states as central to understanding how democracies function and change. For fellows who want to understand the political forces shaping Bihar and the country around them — and may build careers inside those systems — he is a mentor whose work makes that world legible from the inside.