Alumni Feature | Meenu Maria – Joseph | Master’s in Public Policy ‘16

Graduating from the MPP programme in 2016, Meenu Maria Joseph is currently the Regional Head of South India, Public Policy and Corporate Affairs at Ola ANI Technologies, with her efforts mainly towards the mobility business at Ola. Her work at the organization includes but is not limited to, working with various stakeholders and the government to ensure the creation of a compatible regulatory ecosystem. Meenu’s career after MPP is composed of varied experiences. She started out as a Consultant at Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) handling work related to the 2017 elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab ,and Uttarakhand. After a year at I-PAC, she decided to take a break and concentrate on research and teaching. She worked at the Centre for Child and the Law at NLSIU, Bengaluru working closely on the ICSSR project while also working as a visiting faculty at Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru (which is also her alma mater) where she taught a course on Public Policy.

A year later, Meenu joined a Delhi-based policy implementation firm called Indus Action where she initially headed the Kerala team and eventually headed the Karnataka team working primarily on the topic of early childhood care and education with a focus on National Food Security Act programmes and the Right to the Education programme. She also worked on poverty alleviation programmes of the government of Karnataka.

Academically, Meenu has a background in Political Science, Economics and Journalism and joined the MPP programme immediately after finishing her bachelor’s degree. She says that she benefited immensely not just from the experience of the professors but also from the diversity of the batch and the different perspectives that her peers brought to the table in any discussion. Further, she remembers the field visit aided by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) as the most important experience of the course. She opined that the experience from field immersion was crucial in helping her understand the socio-political environment of our country and also led to the development of an intrinsic interest in the local self-government structure. As a person with years of experience in policy implementation, Meenu stresses the importance of receiving inputs from the ground level and expresses how she has strived to keep the stakeholder at the centre of the policy, which she says is one of the most important ideas that she learned at the MPP programme.

While Meenu’s fields of experience are varied, her engagement with important stakeholders has remained a constant feature and continues to resonate in her current work as well.

Quote: “The intersectional approach of the course allows policy professionals to adopt a well-rounded lens and look at things more objectively and not just from a singular standpoint.”