Nijara Deka is a Fellow at NCAER. She is an applied micro-economist with a passion for innovation and research in understanding the value of wellbeing and human development and the measurement of broader outcomes in the evaluation of different public policies, including capabilities and subjective wellbeing. She also has research interests in social inequality, labour and the informal sector, economics of education and health, and sustainable development.

Over the last six years, she has worked on many public policy projects. She obtained her Doctoral degree at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, on analysing Deprivation Characteristics of the Urban Poor, with a case study of Guwahati city, Assam.

She joined the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies in 2016. In 2018, she supported the data analysis and drafting of the report on a Study of a Road Infrastructure Project in North East India Borderland, conducted by the Special Centre for the Study of North East India, JNU.

She was awarded a Foreign Travel Grant by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) to attend the annual Conference of Human Development and Capability Association held at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., USA, in 2015. She also received the Doctoral Fellowship of ICSSR and the Basic Scientific Research (BSR) Fellowship in 2013.