Shekhar

Shekhar joined the research wing of the World Bank in 1989 as Deputy Research Administrator after five years with the Ford Foundation.  At the Bank, Shekhar has served as a member of the Public Sector Board and the Bank’s Editorial Committee, Lead Economist and Country Coordinator for Bangladesh, the manager of the Bank’s work on public sector reforms in Europe and Central Asia, Governance Adviser in the central public sector group, and a member of the research team for the 2004 WDR, Making services work for poor people.  The WDR collaboration with Shanta Devarajan continued when both joined the Vice President’s office in South Asia, leading to considerable joint work, including the flagship paper Can South Asia end poverty in a generation? that provides the inspiration and the title for Shanta’s Blog  (“If I hadn’t blogged here sooner or later, I would have probably lost my job!”)  Click here to listen to a VOA interview with Shekhar answering the question posed by the flagship paper.

At the Bank, Shekhar has worked on poverty measurement and strategy, macroeconomic stabilization, governance and anticorruption, decentralization, urban development, and services delivery in education, health, and infrastructure. He has promoted a clearer focus on politics in the Bank’s work, co-sponsoring a research conference on the Politics of Service Delivery.  

Shekhar received his economics Ph.D. from Columbia University and his BA from Delhi University.  Besides economics, Shekhar enjoys photography and trekking in the middle Himalayas.  For the past three years Shekhar has lived in New Delhi with his artist wife and their black Labrador retriever, Kaza.