Dr. Rahul Karnamadakala Sharma is Director of Research and Impact at Indus Action. In this role, he leads the organisation’s impact monitoring, research and analytics functions, and plays a central role in institutional strategy, communications, and fundraising.

He is also a Research Fellow at the School of Public Policy, University College London, and co-Founder of the Relational State Capacity (RSC) Hub at Indus Action. In these roles, he works on RSC, a new conception of state capacity centred on the relationships between citizens and the state.

Rahul’s research and practice focus on social protection and welfare, state capacity, state-citizen relations, and monitoring and evaluation. He has published widely, including numerous reports, policy briefs and opinions on administrative burden, Moments that Matter, the Right to Education, administrative reform in India, and in the journals Science, Nature Energy, and Energy for Sustainable Development. He is regularly invited to speak, teach and advise on these topics.

Rahul serves as an advisory board member of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience Observatory (CARO), established by Stanford University and UCSB. He was an Associate Editor for the Journal of Environment and Development and Lead Author of UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook on Cities 2021. He was also a National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) Fellow at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi.

Rahul holds a PhD in Public Management and Quantitative Methods from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a Regent’s Scholar. He received an MPP from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and was a Postgraduate Fellow at Yale University.