I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University, researching political behavior and the politics of economic development, with a focus on South Asia. Before joining Duke, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. I received a PhD in Political Science from Yale University, a B.A. in History and Politics from Balliol College, Oxford, and a B.A. in History from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.

My research focuses on how changes in the economic landscape shape democratic accountability, whether that be the adoption of new technologies, rapid urbanization, or environmental degradation. My book project, Innovation Without Transformation, examines the technological shifts in India’s welfare state and how the adoption of digital public infrastructure shapes voting behavior. In other work, I look at why decentralization of power to urban municipal authorities often fails to improve governance and political responsiveness, and why citizens don’t hold elected officials accountable for environmental crises like air pollution. I use a mixed-methods approach to study these questions, combining experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork.

In addition to research, I teach courses in comparative politics and quantitative methods for social scientific research. In 2020, I received a university-wide award at Yale for excellence in teaching.