Policy Careers, Digital Governance & Finding Your Way In
Policy Post #216
Dear Reader,
Most people don’t enter policy with a plan. They enter with curiosity, urgency, and very little clarity about where they fit. Over the past year, that tension kept surfacing across PPI’s work — in classrooms, workshops, and institutional spaces alike. People want to do meaningful policy work, but often find a gap between learning the language and knowing how to operate within the system.
How do people actually find their way into policy?
Where does learning stop and practice begin?
And what does it mean for a policy community to build capacity, not just access?
This edition reflects on those questions. You’ll see them play out in conversations on accidental policy careers, in debates on digital governance and public infrastructure, and in the pathways we’re shaping with partners like Sinceriti, where intent meets real-world constraints. Resources responding to these gaps are gathered toward the end of the newsletter.
We’re carrying these questions into 2026 — not as promises, but as work we’re committed to doing, openly and alongside the community.
Let’s get into Policy Post #216.
Policy Charcha 💬
The best of Podcasts, Videos, Essays, Fellowships and other Career resources from the world of Policy and Governance from the week gone by!
📺 Podcast Highlight
Accidental Policy Careers & the Evolving Tech Policy Space
In this episode of Policy Panchayat, Uthara Ganesh, Head of Public Policy at Snapchat India and South Asia, speaks with Yash Agarwal about her journey from the LAMP Fellowship into tech policy.
The conversation reflects a familiar reality in the policy space — most people don’t plan their way in. They discover the field gradually, learning its complexities only after stepping inside. A timely listen, especially as fellowship season picks up.
👥 From the PPI Community #PolicyTalks
Yash at the Andhra Pradesh State Youth Festival 2025
As part of #PPITalks, PPI was at the Andhra Pradesh State Youth Festival 2025, spending time with young people thinking seriously about policy, institutions, and what it takes to enter public life.
The room was driven by questions — about governance, opportunity, and where young voices sit within systems that shape everyday outcomes.
🔎 Research & Resources
Careers and Public Policy: An A–Z Guide to the Public Policy Field in India
Our e-book brings together lessons from across the policy ecosystem to make the field more legible — mapping spaces, functions, and pathways without pretending there is a single route in.
🏛️ Event Highlight
Digital Governance Summit — Shaastra 2026
📍 IIT Madras | 🗓️ 3–5 January
At Shaastra 2026, global leaders across GovTech, policy, and implementation will come together to examine how Digital Public Infrastructure is reshaping governance in India.
In partnership with eGov, iSPIRT, eMudhra, and DigiPin, the summit focuses on what it takes to build digital systems that are accountable, scalable, and institutionally sound — where policy is written not just in legislation, but in platforms and code.
🔎 Databases and Guides:
Discover your ultimate career resource sheets for everything related to public policy! Our comprehensive mega-lists include 150+ hiring organisations, 200+ scholarships, and 150+ courses, podcasts and a lot more. Dive in and unlock your next big opportunity!
✨ Spotlight of the Week
Our newest initiative at Public Policy India!
This week’s Spotlight features Rai Sengupta, an evaluation specialist whose work sits at the intersection of evidence, institutions, and people. Currently an Evaluation Consultant with the UNICEF Evaluation Office, Rai supports global evaluations across health and nutrition, child protection, climate change, and WASH. Her work spans governments, bilateral agencies, and multilaterals — including roles with Invest India, the Asian Development Bank, and Ecorys in London.
A global recipient of the Feminist Innovations in Monitoring and Evaluation (FIME) award, Rai leads work advancing feminist evaluation in crisis contexts and has presented her toolkit at UN Women, the World Bank, and ADB. Alongside this, she is deeply committed to mentoring early-career evaluators, having led 40+ capacity-building workshops across institutions such as NITI Aayog, the University of Cambridge, and the World Bank. Her advice is simple: stay curious, stay human — and never lose sight of the stories behind the data.
📣 Why Authenticity Is Getting Harder to Signal — And One Tool Trying to Fix It
Across the impact and policy ecosystem, applicants are discovering a tough truth. With applications increasingly polished and often AI-assisted it has become harder for recruiters to see what genuinely drives a candidate over time. This is the gap Sinceriti is trying to address.
Built by senior leaders in the social impact sector (including a former Partner at Dalberg), Sinceriti introduces a simple idea: every applicant receives 100 “commitment points” each year, which they allocate across causes and organisations they truly value. These allocations are timestamped, tamper-proof, and locked — creating a credible trail of what you’ve consistently cared about and worked toward.
Fellowships like the LedBy Accelerator and the Gandhi Fellowship are already using Sinceriti in their application cycles. For candidates exploring roles in the impact space, the platform is free.
Reach the team at contact@sinceriti.co
🌟 Avenues for Upskilling
Public Policy Puzzle
Public Policy Puzzle (PPP) is a platform on a mission to make public policy accessible, engaging, and useful for students, young professionals, and curious citizens. Through courses, resources, and interactive formats.
🌍Climate + Health Corner
In Partnership With Swasti, The Health Catalyst
Before the Flood: Climate change is a governance failure unfolding in real time.
Directed by Fisher Stevens and fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio, Before the Flood traces the global, interconnected impacts of climate change while asking uncomfortable questions about political will, power, and accountability.
What sets the film apart is its refusal to stop at awareness. It points directly to policy choices from fossil fuel subsidies to carbon taxation and argues that climate action cannot rely on individual behaviour alone.
Careers Corner 💼
A curated list of some of the best jobs and internship opportunities this week from the world of public policy, the development sector, impact consulting and communications at large.
📩 Best bit - if you know of a job/internship opening that’s not listed here, kindly just add that as a comment on the sheet: giving 20,000+ people immediate access to it!
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This really captures the messy reality of how people actually enter policy work. The gap between learning the language and knowing how to navigate the system is so often underestimated, and I appreciate the focus on building capacity rather than just creating access points. I've seen firsthand how fellowships can kinda throw people into deep water without much of a map. The Sinceriti concept is interesting too becuase it addresses the credibility challenge in an age where every application looks polished.