Pallavi Choudhuri is a Professor and Deputy Director at the NCAER–National Data Innovation Center (NDIC). Her research focuses on social protection, informality, poverty, employment, and gender. As part of the core research team for the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS), she contributed to the design and implementation of its third wave.
Her work has been published in international journals such as World Development and the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology (forthcoming), alongside contributions to prominent Indian newspapers, including the Economic Times, Indian Express, and The Hindu. She is also the lead editor of India’s Social and Economic Transformation in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2023).
Dr. Choudhuri is an active member of professional economics and demography associations and has served on various government committees during her tenure at NCAER. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wyoming.
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.
K.A. Siddiqui is a Senior Advisor at NCAER with a background in Input-Output Modelling, macroeconomics and large scale primary studies. He has developed a user-friendly dashboard using data of NCAER’s National Survey of Households on Income and Expenditure. In the past, he has worked on various studies related to Tourism Satellite Account, Social Accounting Matrix, Informal economy and labour market analysis.
Gurucharan Manna is a Senior Advisor at NCAER. He was the Director General of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) in the Government of India. Dr Manna has nearly 40 years of specialized experience in the development of sample design, estimation procedures for household and establishment surveys, and the design of survey questionnaires and related documents for fieldwork and data validation. Over the years, his responsibilities at NSSO/CSO have included the compilation of GDP estimates; conduct of the 6th Economic Census; technical coordination and supervision of the Annual Survey of Industries, Energy Statistics, and Infrastructure Statistics; compilation of the Index of Industrial Production and the Index of Service Production; finalization of survey methodologies and reports for NSSO socio-economic surveys; and compilation of foreign trade statistics. He is currently the Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board of Sarvekshana – a half-yearly journal being brought out by National Statistics Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. He is also the Chairman of the Expert Committee to review the existing methodology of Integrated Sample Survey as well as Chairman of the Expert Committee on Economic Census, 2025-26. He is also a Member of the Advisory Committee on National Accounts Statistics.
