Aakriti is Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Specialist at the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), NITI Aayog, India's national policy think tank, where she designs and leads evaluations that feed into government decision-making. With over ten years of experience in applied social research and development policy, she has led large-scale government evaluations, including studies informing India's Finance Commission, and is currently leading institutional assessments of two of India's largest government-run school networks. She also leads output-outcome monitoring frameworks across government ministries. Earlier, at UNDP's tribal affairs programme, she led an assessment of 740 tribal schools that resulted in policy corrections adopted by the Ministry. She has since conducted impact assessments of several social protection and flagship programmes in India, and her research helped the Pratham Education Foundation strengthen its rural intervention programme for out-of-school children. Grounded in action research in governance and a background as a Teach For India Fellow, her work insists that evidence remain close to the people it’s meant to serve and that evaluation be built for use — not for the shelf.