Revati Vaidya

Revati Vaidya is a public policy professional focused on tech-enabled services for public good. She combines digital innovation with inclusive service delivery, having worked on creating resilient systems that address farmers' diverse access and information needs across varying levels of digital literacy and trust. Most recently, she led strategy and partnerships for a digital agriculture initiative within India’s Ministry of Agriculture, scaling national platforms that impacted over 10 million smallholder farmers.

At Precision Development (PxD), Revati led the development and scaling of Ama Krushi, Odisha’s flagship farmer hotline, growing its reach before transitioning it to the state government through a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model. Now serving over 8 million farmers, the program demonstrates how innovation can be institutionalized through public–philanthropic partnerships, shaping her expertise in driving and sustaining large-scale change within government systems.

Her career spans grassroots interventions, venture capital, and policymaking—giving her a cross-sectoral view of how systems change happens. These experiences have also deepened her belief that while technology can be transformative, its real impact depends on the intent, governance, and design behind it.

Revati is particularly interested in policy frameworks for secure, interoperable, and rights-respecting Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). Her focus includes data governance, ethical tech regulation, and crisis-resilient digital ecosystems. She is driven by the urgent need for interdisciplinary leadership that can bridge technical fluency with public purpose to ensure digital systems serve as inclusive, durable public goods.

She holds a Master’s in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and will pursue a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School, planning to focus on technology policy.

Revati is an avid science fiction reader, drawn to its ability to imagine alternative futures—because we can only build a world we are able to envision.

Chitra Shah

Chitra Shah recently graduated with an Advanced Major in Political Science and a Minor in History from Ashoka University.

The confluence of language and politics lies at the heart of Chitra’s research interests. The linguistic link from South Asia’s own medieval Persianate history prompted her curiosity about the Middle East, Iran in particular. The negotiations of linguistic and intellectual exchange across South Asia and the Middle East have informed her study of the region.

Having been Teaching Assistant for undergraduate courses at Ashoka, the most rewarding experience of which was in her discussions with students, Chitra finds teaching and pedagogical exercises to be both an object of academic inquiry and the objective of her academic pursuits. Therefore, in her research, Chitra is interested in questions of postcolonialism, epistemological interventions, and temporality.

Chitra will be pursuing the MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, where she hopes to train further in the intellectual history and political thought of the region. She plans to ground her research in the developments of Iran, to expand into discourses of the larger Shi’i world. While she has been training in Persian at Ashoka, she expects to start learning Arabic at Oxford. She intends to continue with research, to explore fresh approaches to learning about and engaging with the discourse and experiences that constitute her study.

Ayush Shahi

Ayush graduated from Ashoka University in 2025 with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance and a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Economics. His research interests lie broadly in development economics, and using data to study issues of labour, discrimination, and inequality. His current work, undertaken as part of an undergraduate thesis and research projects at Ashoka, focuses on the economic costs of social norms. Previously, he has worked in research roles as an intern at Good Business Lab, an organisation designing interventions to improve blue-collar labour well-being, and as a research assistant to faculty at Ashoka University.

To further explore these interests, Ayush will now be pursuing a Masters in International and Development Economics at Yale University. He hopes to expand the set of research themes he is exposed to before pursuing a PhD, and work towards his goal of becoming an economist bridging the gap between policy and data-driven research in the Global South.

Besides his academic interests, Ayush volunteers his time to mentorship initiatives. He strongly believes that supportive mentorship can help solve for some of the information barriers and privileged access to networks that limit access to career and educational opportunities, especially for those from marginalized backgrounds. For leisure, he enjoys reading, film photography, watching football, and reviewing food with his friends.