Arkaja Singh is a lawyer by training, with over twenty years of experience in the area of governance, institutions and legal reform. Her work focusses on the interplay of institutional design and state practice, how law shapes, and is shaped by the work of public administration.
Her areas of expertise include urban governance, municipalities, and the legal and policy questions around land, informality, municipal services and the management of the urban environment.
Her recent work includes in-depth study of the impact of the Smart Cities Mission on urban governance and municipal institutions. She co-authored a recently published public management study on municipal waste management reforms in Indore. She contributed chapters on property rights and environmental governance of geothermal energy, and provided environmental governance perspectives to programmes on air quality management and ‘responsible RE’.
At CPR, she is currently engaged in the development of the legal and institutional framework for Amaravati, the new capital city of Andhra Pradesh. Previously, she managed a large programme on sanitation, where she provided legal and regulatory perspectives on wastewater governance, sanitation labour and the challenges of sanitation in dense and informally planned settlements.
She ran a year- long seminar series on market regulation titled ‘Know Your Regulator’, and considered questions of state-capacity in India’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020-21. She contributed to studies of water governance, and the impact of the human right to water in global perspective (‘Elevating Water Rights to Human Rights’) in collaboration with the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen.
Arkaja is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. She studied law at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and has a LL.M. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
