This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Arkaja Singh, a Fellow at CPR, who has worked across a whole range of topics broadly converging around the idea of ‘administrative coherence.

Having studied at the National Law School and SOAS, Singh spent a decade in development sector consulting and research before joining CPR. She has conducted research across a wide span of topics – from sanitation and manual scavenging to informal settlements and land titling to the framework of the Indian administrative state. The throughline across these different areas is a focus on understanding why government operates in the way it does, and what it would take to alter and reform it, not just in operations but in its international rationale.

In the first part of the conversation with Singh, we spoke about her years as a ‘governance consultant’ and how that differs from her time at CPR, what she means by ‘administrative coherence’ and her research into the municipal state.

In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive in a fortnight, we spoke Singh’s research on how we cannot understand about access to water without first tackling the state’s approach to land, whether there is sufficient thinking about rationalities and histories within government and what advice she has for young scholars entering the policy space.