Kanksshi Agarwal
Founder, NETRI Foundation
IndiaKanksshi Agarwal is the Founder of NETRI Foundation- India’s first incubator & aggregator for women in the political ecosystem. She is a policy researcher working at the intersection of technology, society, gender, and politics. She has been covered by LiveMint’s 100 women Entrepreneurs who are shaping and building India, as one of the women alongside doyens like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Priyanka Chopra, etc. She has also been the FemiList-100 awardee by Gender Security Project for championing the rights of women. She is trained in Leadership, Organizing, and Action by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on full scholarship. NETRI has been incubated by IIM-Bangalore, Nudge Foundation, and supported by Capgemini and JP Morgan Chase. NETRI is building India’s first politico-tech to aggregate opportunities and resources for people aspiring to join politics in India.
In the past, she has worked as a Technology policy researcher with CPR. She has worked with the All India Congress Committee Research Department and formed a part of the core research team behind drafting the Election Manifesto for Congress during the General Election of 2019. She has been a part of multiple prestigious fellowships- LAMP Fellowship, Citizen for Public Leadership Fellowship, and Lead like a Girl- Shenomics Fellowship and has been awarded Rex Karamveer Chakra (Bronze, Silver-2019) instituted with United Nations. Having completed her Masters’s in Urban Policy and Governance from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai she is trained in qualitative and quantitative research. In past, as a State-in charge (youth advocate) with UN Women’s HeForShe gender solidarity campaign for Madhya Pradesh, she devised a strategy and led the plan, and helped numerous men to pledge solidarity. In 2018, she was the youngest panelist at a women’s leadership conference, held under the aegis of the Ministry of Women and Child Development organized in Hyderabad by VROneness Foundation. She has been invited to speak at multiple National and International forums. Bareilly, UP. She writes for various digital content platforms such as The Wire, Feminism in India, etc. When she is not working, she spends time indulging in Urdu and Hindi poetry written by the progressive writers of undivided India.