About
Leads knowledge and data products at Arghyam and India Water Portal.
Building for the next billion. Interested in climate action, accesibility, learning and inclusion.
Work Experience
Building Digital Public Infrastructure for water, leading efforts to create a DPI for the water sector in India.
India has the world's largest drinking water project. At Arghyam, we're creating the building blocks to solve water problems across the country.
Learning from the architects of Aadhar, UPI and IndiaStack, we're creating a water stack that enables, state governments and private actors to solve the water crisis.
I work with central ministry to create standards, APIs and reference implementations. In tandem, I work with state governments to utilize these improvements to pilot and validate prototypes.
Led development and editorial teams to maintain multiple media sites and knowledge platforms for India Water Portal, a dedicated knowledge portal on water.
Led editorial and content strategy, created the most listened podcast on water in India - Voices for Water.
Scaled site architecture to support audience growth from 200k to 1.6 million per month.
Reduced AWS server expenses by consolidating services, optimizing servers, it led to annual savings of 40%.
Adopted Agile by working with multiple teams to bring predictability to feature releases.
Managed a SaaS based learning management system with 20k+ community users.
Managed tech-support team that deployed and handled L1 and L2 support across 9+ Indian states.
Enabled 1500+ trainers to adopt to our platform by creating and sharing best practices.
Reduced onboarding time from 10 to 2 days by templating process for new partners.
Managed multiple data and technology products
Spearheaded implementation of Open-source Learning Management System.
Mentored water experts to recreate courses from slides to reusable learning modules.
Established field data collection tools for community workers to monitor groundwater levels.
Researched pricing feasibility and market feasibility for new services and products.
Trained rural field agents to conduct product demos and installations of new products.
Developed client acquisition and developer engagement pipelines.
On-field product research and demo of software to prospective clients.
Created developer community events and outreach practices that improved hiring
Created web modules for microfinance workflows between field agents and loan officers.
Built a custom module for content providers to develop and deploy learning content.
Designed interfaces for first-time technology users with low-end smartphones.
Reduced survey duration from 4 hours to 45 minutes with form automations.
Optimized monitoring and validation of field data for loan officers.
Helped pivot Arghyam from a traditional philanthropy to an ecosystem enabler. Inspired by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
I led a multi stakeholder team in developing and deploying a learning management system with a focus on openness and sharing.
Trainers were able to create modules easily, translate modules easily and partners were able to build courses from all available content, not just their own.
Codebase of new modules created were contributed to the ecosystem. All content created on the platform was Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0)
As I started managing India Water Portal, I realized that most nonprofits who are poised to use GIS tools do not have an understanding on availability of datasets on groundwater and related resources(Land Use/Land Cover, Precipitation).
Commissioned this grant to analyze available datasets and to build a prototype that can overlay selected datasets.
Built workflows to collect data for groundwater monitoring, trained NGOs across India
Having used ODK in the previous projects and understanding its limitations (lack of case management, ease of use, and update lags) I evaluated other open and SaaS data collection platforms
I rolled out KoboCollect with templates for groundwater data that nonprofit partners can quickly duplicate and collect data about their groundwater resources.
Trained NGOs in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura on how to collect data, data standards and interpreting collected data.
These rollouts led to National Mission on Himalayan Studies
(NMHS) implementing tools and standards in Uttarakhand, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh
Customized ODK to build an inventory of springs in 3 districts of Odisha.
Consulted water experts and local data collecting volunteers to create standards
Trained 50 people over 2 days to collect data of 300 springs in 2 months.
Collated and visualized this data that led to the creation of the 1000 Springs Initiative by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs
Speaking
Commons: A Conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Indian Languages and Archives
In this panel, I shared my learnings managing a multi-language low-bandwidth platform that has first time technology users.
Shared culture and technological challenges that organisations must overcome to lead data-driven interventions in the development sector.
As part of IFIP TC13 Special Interest Group on Interaction Design for International Development, presented on language learning games to compliment school education for rural Indian students.
Side Projects
ReRoll is a community-focused board games collective in Bangalore. What started as a way for a few friends to share our joy of boardgaming grew to become the largest board game group in India.
Collaborated with therapists to set up pro-bono therapy sessions during 1st and 2nd waves of COVID. I onboarded therapists onto a scheduling platform, trained them on how to use and customize their slots based on their availability.
Writing
First of a series of articles on digital commons and water.
Volunteering
Was part of a 5-day institute by IT for Change to capacitate civil society actors with the necessary vocabulary and tools to appropriately frame and approach emerging digital intersections with their work, as well as develop strategies for effective political organization.
As part of the TICTeC Labs programme, mySociety convened TICTeC Action Lab (aka working group) to discuss common challenges in using civic tech to encourage people to change and coordinate their behaviour in ways that can cause significant changes in society, specifically through the lens of climate action.
As part of the consultations for upcoming National Data Platform, I gave inputs on the proposed technical architecture. I shared nonprofits challenges in contributing and accessing open data.
Advised Data Management Sub Group for Karnataka State Water Policy on data gaps in public data, need for community owned data governance and management.
Mentored teams working on solutions for water security, by sharing data, limitations of current alternatives.
Hosted the first Bangalore Open Data Camp, an unconference with participation from NGOs, data scientists, technology firms and social impact business.
Also ran workshops to liberate data, and manage the community.
Love the community, volunteered in different roles over the years - logistics, video streaming, network setup, speaker support and the likes.
Learnt from talks, interacted with experts, was an overall ball to be a part of.
Education
Development Studies with a specialization in Sustainability
Computer Science and Engineering