Ashish Kumar is a Distinguished Fellow, Pahle India Foundation, a think tank. He is also an Advisor and Consultant on One Trillion Dollar Project of Government of UP. He heads two committees of Government of India: Committee for base year revision of Consumer Price Index (CPI) setup by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation and Committee to develop Gender Parity Index for corporate sector setup by Ministry of Women and Child Development. He also heads the Committee set up by the UP Government for Development of Methodology for compilation of District Domestic Product (DDP) and conduct of Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Survey of Unincorporated Enterprises (SUSE) for pilot districts.

He was a Senior Fellow at the NITI Aayog, pursuing a project on the estimation of size and composition of digital economy. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi and a Statistical Advisor to the UNICEF project on participation and empowerment of women in the MNREGA of the Government of India in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal-focusing on inter-district comparison.

He completed his Masters in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Lucknow, before going on to get a PG Diploma in Business Administration from University of Delhi and another Masters in Development Economics from University of East Anglia, UK.

Prior to joining the NITI Aayog, Mr. Kumar was the Director of the UN Statistical Institute for Asia and the Pacific where he was involved in the strategic planning for capacity building of nation statistics offices in the Asia and the Pacific region, organization of short term, long term and e-learning programmes on various aspects of official statistics including SDG Indicators, use of administrative, mobile and other non-traditional sources of data for monitoring of development.

He started his professional career as an officer of Indian Statistical Service, Government of India in 1977 and served for over 38 years in various capacities. In his long and illustrious career, he has been involved in the preparation of national accounts and other economic statistics including development of Supply Use Tables in India for the first time, digitization of data collection mechanism for the Annual Survey of Industries, collection and processing of socio-economic survey data, policy formulation and implementation of programmes for empowerment of persons with disability, development and implementation of programmes for North-eastern region and much more.

He has been consultant of various International and national organizations like International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNICEF, National Foundation of India (NFI) etc.

He has authored numerous reports and research papers which have been published in the Journal of Indian Association for Research in National Wealth, the Journal of National Sample Survey Organization, and as the Handbook of Social Statistics 2007, etc.

Mr. Ashish can be reached at ashish.kumar@pahleindia.org or ashish.km2003@gmail.com