Shashwat Kumar

Shashwat Kumar is a fellow with the Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In this role, he leads the chair's energy and climate projects and works closely with the Indian states to strengthen U.S.-India relations on energy and climate. Previously, Shashwat received the prestigious Marie Curie scholarship from the European Commission to pursue his PhD. He was a doctoral fellow from 2018–22 at Barcelona Institute of International Relations (IBEI) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). His doctoral research, titled “Regulatory Arrangements and electricity governance: India in a comparative perspective,” examined electricity regulation and governance in India at national and subnational level. From 2015–17 Shashwat worked as a management consultant at ABPS Infrastructure Advisory Private Limited in Mumbai, where he assisted state electricity regulatory commissions and utilities (government-owned and private) across five states in India with electricity tariff design for the distribution and transmission utilities. Shashwat holds a masters’ degree in regulatory governance from TISS Mumbai. For the past eight years he has been working on the energy policies of the Indian states. As a practitioner he has the direct experience of working with stakeholders on important regulatory matters such as tariff design, competition, licensing etc. As an academic he has extensively researched and published on Indian electricity sector. His research advanced the regulatory governance discourse in India by examining interaction of past electricity reform principles with emerging issues surrounding renewable energy and its impact on overall energy governance.