Nishant Misra

Nishant is graduating with a BSc in Economics from Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR. His interests include political economy, development economics, microeconomics, social choice theory, game theory, and applied econometrics. He greatly enjoys field work and is also interested in mathematics, particularly in modern analysis and operator theory. Most of his academic work has been driven by the belief that good economics requires a conscious engagement with the field, the actual people whose lives we wish to improve, whilst respecting their dignity and agency. 

His work on residential segregation seeks to formulate a microeconomic model and explain patterns of ghettoisation in India from first principles. He is also investigating the systematic bypassing of religious and caste minorities in the provision of public infrastructure by using optimisation theory in conjunction with causal inference techniques to identify selective allocation in situations where a strict empirical identification is not possible. Beyond this interest in segregation, he has worked on competitive exams and social justice, and is currently working on approval voting rules and their properties. He eventually wishes to work on the theory of inter-group conflict. 

He is committed to the democratisation of education, and is currently compiling a student-led database of educational resources (SoPs, programme reviews, internship resources, research areas etc.) for a host of disciplines, ranging from history to finance to mathematics. These resources are provided by students who have successfully secured admissions/jobs/scholarships or conducted research in these fields. He will be joining the research-intensive MA in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he hopes to engage in research on social norms, and foster collaboration between different perspectives on the economics, extending insights from his study in India to the rest of the world. His other interests include reading, travel, powerlifting, cooking, and teaching.

Aiswarya Raj

Aiswarya Raj is a journalist covering Uttarakhand with five years of experience. She began her career at The Indian Express as a sub-editor with the Delhi city team before covering southern Haryana and later transitioning to the role of a resident correspondent based in Dehradun for the newspaper.

An alumna of the Asian College of Journalism, Aiswarya has conducted investigations using the Right to Information Act, focusing on law enforcement, public policy, and procurement rules, and has worked on long-form stories centred on governance issues and legislation affecting local communities in Haryana and Uttarakhand. Her reporting has also delved into the implementation and social impact of laws concerning religious conversion, minority rights, and policing.

Aiswarya led an investigative series into alleged favouritism in an Uttarakhand tourism project, establishing links between the contractor and a major corporate entity, and alleged violations of procurement policy and tender rules. The two-member team received the Danish Siddiqui Award for Journalism in 2026.

She is headed to Columbia Journalism School in the United States to pursue a Master of Arts with a concentration in politics to deepen her grasp of investigative, data-driven, and political reporting. Aiswarya intends to continue the line of inquiry into majoritarian politics in India and beyond. 

Sahil Sharma

Sahil Sharma is a researcher with a Master's in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad (2024). He works with Leadership for Equity, an NGO focused on improving public school systems in India, where his sociological training has shaped the way he approaches questions of inequality in education.

He will begin his PhD at King's College London (KCL) this year, studying caste transformations in the twentieth century, with a focus on the western Himalayas. The study will investigate how certain ethnic groups in the Himalayan princely states transformed themselves as dominant castes and what that process reveals about the mechanisms by which caste ascent is made possible at all. 

Working across archives in London, New Delhi, Shimla and oral histories gathered in the field, the research traces the distance between the official record of caste and the private narratives through which families have understood their own ascent. The Himalayas have long been treated as a footnote in scholarship on caste in India, a region of interest for its kinship arrangements but peripheral to the larger story. Sahil's work begins with the suspicion that the region is not peripheral at all, but a place where some of the most consequential questions about how caste is made and how states have shaped it can be asked with unusual clarity.

At KCL, Sahil will work with Dr Ina Zharkevich and Dr Mayssoun Sukarieh at the Department of International Development, which focuses on context-specific political and social change in emerging economies, and draw on the broader scholarly resources of the King's India Institute.

When not working, Sahil is often found cooking up new recipes, playing repetitive guitar chords, and attempting to write a peer-reviewed history of the Eagles of Middle-earth.