Viha Dwivedi is a Research Associate at NCAER. Her research focuses on health policy, gender, and development economics, with particular interest in impact evaluation and causal inference. She has previously worked at NCAER, contributing to national-level policy assessments and socio-economic analysis.
Viha is an MSc Economics and Policy graduate (Distinction) from King’s College London, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Mathematics from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.
Suresh Goyal is the Director General of National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) effective January 5th, 2026.
Mr Suresh Goyal has over 30 years of experience across the private and public sectors. He joins NCAER after his assignment as the Managing Director and CEO of the National Highway Infra Trust (NHIT), which was set up by the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways and the National Highways Authority of India to support the National Monetisation Pipeline. Starting as the first employee in 2020, Mr Suresh Goyal built NHIT into one of the largest road platforms, with an enterprise value of ~INR 48,000 crore, thereby contributing significantly to the government’s monetisation agenda. He successfully managed multiple stakeholders, including a 10-member board comprising government, institutions, and independent directors, steering NHIT to deliver consistent performance. Before moving to the government role, Mr Goyal had spent his career in the private sector, with his last stint at Macquarie Infrastructure & Real Assets as Senior Managing Director and Head of India and South-East Asia, based in Singapore.
Mr Goyal is an Electrical Engineer and has an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow.
Ms. Anuradha Thakur, a senior Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 1994 batch from the Himachal Pradesh cadre, brings over three decades of administrative expertise in economic affairs, corporate governance, and financial regulation. She currently serves as the Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs and serves as an ex-officio member of both the Reserve Bank of India and the Securities and Exchange Board of India in this capacity.
Her career spans diverse leadership roles across the Government of India. As Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, she oversaw corporate governance and regulatory frameworks. She led large corporate fraud investigations during her tenure as Director of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office. As Joint Secretary at the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management, she spearheaded strategic disinvestment initiatives, including the privatization of Air India, and played a pivotal role in launching Bharat Bond ETFs. Internationally, she served as Adviser to the Executive Director at the World Bank, Washington DC.
Ms. Thakur holds a Post-Graduate degree in Psychology. She has further enhanced her expertise through specialized training in Development Economics & Finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. As a Visiting Fellow with the Centre for Advanced Study for India (CASI) at University of Pennsylvania, she worked on issues related to urban development.
Ms. Thakur has authored and published numerous articles in leading dailies and magazines on water resource management, urban development, social welfare legislation and financial inclusion.
Nishat Anjum is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) at NCAER. She uses a combination of applied microeconomic theory and experiments to study questions in gender, labour, political economy, and behavioural development economics. She has been an Intern at the World Bank in the summer of 2025, where she helped design large-scale RCTs to understand how social norms affect youth behaviour. Earlier, she has worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University in 2021, on the India Working Survey (IWS).
Nishat holds a PhD and MA in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and a BSc (Hons) in Economics from St Xavier’s College, Kolkata.