Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research. Her research interests are in the field of social policy and development. In 2008, she founded the Accountability Initiative at the Centre. Under her leadership, the Initiative has produced significant research in the areas of governance, state capacity and social policy. It pioneered a new approach to tracking public expenditures for social policy programmes and is widely recognized for running the country’s largest expenditure-tracking survey in elementary education. Ms. Aiyar’s own research on social accountability, elementary education, decentralization and administrative reform has received both academic and popular recognition. Ms. Aiyar is a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) fellow and a founding member of the International Experts Panel of the Open Government Partnership. She has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s global council on good governance. She previously worked with the Water and Sanitation Programme and Rural Development unit of the World Bank in Delhi, where she focused on action research aimed at strengthening mechanisms for citizen engagement in local government. She was a member of the decentralization team at the World Bank that provided policy support to strengthen the Panchayati Raj (local governance) in India. Ms. Aiyar is an alumna of the London School of Economics, Saint Edmund’s College, Cambridge University and Saint Stephen’s College of Delhi University.