# Gurjot Sidhu

Gurjot Sidhu is a policy and data professional who works at the intersection of education, public systems, and technology. His career is anchored in using evidence, analysis, and operational design to improve how education systems work—especially in India’s public sector. Across his consulting roles with UNICEF, the World Bank, and education-focused organisations, he has helped shape policy, strengthen data systems, support implementation, and build the capacity of government teams to make better decisions. He also maintains a strong independent practice in software, data tools, and public-interest writing, reflecting a profile that blends policy depth with technical curiosity.

What sets him apart from many consultants is that he rarely occupies a purely advisory role. He owns delivery. Across most of his engagements, he has been responsible not just for recommending what should happen, but for making it happen—building the systems, producing the outputs, navigating the stakeholders, and holding the thread across changing circumstances.

## Overall profile

Gurjot Sidhu comes across as a rare hybrid: part policy analyst, part data practitioner, part builder, and part writer. His work is rooted in the public sector and social impact, especially education, but he brings to it the habits of someone who thinks like a technologist and communicates like an explainer. He is strongest where systems are complex, data is messy, and the goal is to turn evidence into action.

He is not simply someone who works on education. He is someone who helps make education systems more legible, more measurable, and more responsive—and who also builds the tools and narratives that make that work easier to share with others. In practice, that means he often ends up doing more than his formal brief suggests: filling gaps, unblocking delivery, and moving things forward when institutional inertia or resource constraints would otherwise slow them down.

## Who he is

At a high level, Gurjot is someone who brings together three distinct but connected identities:

1. **A public policy consultant** who supports education planning, monitoring, and reform—with operational ownership over delivery, not just analysis.
2. **A data and systems thinker** who uses analysis, dashboards, reporting structures, and data pipelines to improve decision-making, often building those systems himself from scratch.
3. **A builder and writer** who experiments with software, maintains public notes and essays, and creates tools that make complex information more usable. His public sites describe this mix well: he says he works across software, education, data, writing, and "things in-between," while his Rough Copy publication frames his work as short notes and data explorations about public policy.

His online presence shows a person who is thoughtful, technically capable, and unusually comfortable moving between policy language, implementation detail, and code. On GitHub, he presents himself as a development-sector professional who keeps up a long-standing technology habit; on his personal site, he curates writing, tools, and side projects with a clear preference for utility and experimentation.

## What he does

Gurjot’s core professional work is in **education policy, system strengthening, and data-informed planning**. He has contributed to major public-sector and development-sector initiatives, including work on West Bengal’s first State Education Policy, India’s flagship school education scheme Samagra Shiksha, vocational education and training, and state-level education management information systems. His CV and work history show repeated responsibility for policy drafting, analytical reporting, stakeholder coordination, capacity building, and implementation support.

A consistent pattern runs through his work:
- turning messy or fragmented data into clear recommendations,
- translating analysis into decision-maker-friendly briefs and reports,
- building tools and reporting systems that make governance easier,
- and helping institutions improve how they plan, monitor, and learn.

He appears especially motivated by the practical side of policy: not just what a policy says, but how it is implemented, measured, funded, and improved over time. That shows up clearly in his work on differential planning, district report cards, MIS dashboards, data management protocols, and monitoring frameworks.

Equally important is how he works. Government engagements are rarely stable: priorities shift, crises interrupt, key officials get transferred, timelines compress. Gurjot has developed a habit of setting explicit quality standards and success criteria early in an engagement – not as bureaucratic formality, but as a way of preserving effectiveness when the ground moves beneath a project. That orientation toward clarity and ownership has made him a reliable presence in complex, uncertain environments.

## Professional background

### UNICEF - Government education systems work

At UNICEF, Gurjot has worked as a consultant in data management and education planning since June 2021. In that role, he helped coordinate with the Government of West Bengal, contributed to strategic inputs for education policy, and supported the drafting of the state’s first education policy. He also developed and presented policy briefs and advisory notes, helped establish data management and reporting protocols, and designed capacity-building workshops for education functionaries.

This work was not just conceptual or advisory. The crux of his contribution at UNICEF West Bengal has been injecting speed, efficiency, and effectiveness into government projects that were constrained by legacy processes and limited technical capacity. He led efforts to translate large administrative datasets into curated, decision-relevant views for use at state, district, and sub-district levels—building those systems himself rather than specifying them for others to build. As a result, the state education department adopted standardised reporting formats and routines used for regular programme reviews, district performance discussions, and internal planning—including district report cards and state-level briefs routinely shared with senior officials. He also led technical teams to create MIS dashboards and built structured ways for government and UNICEF teams to use data more effectively.

Stakeholder navigation has been central to this role. As a consultant operating across a government hierarchy, Gurjot has consistently had to identify and resolve misalignments between decision-makers and implementors—ensuring that what senior officials want is understood at the operational level, and that ground-level realities are fed back up to inform decisions. That alignment work rarely appears in job descriptions, but it is often the difference between a system that gets used and one that doesn't.

A significant part of this work involved building capacity for evidence use. He developed and delivered hybrid training programmes for education functionaries focused on practical skills—data management, interpreting indicators, and using evidence for planning and course correction. These programmes reached hundreds of district and sub-district officials. He also oversaw multiple research and evaluation studies on issues such as secondary school dropout patterns and region-specific education challenges, synthesising findings into policy briefs and presentations used to inform targeted interventions and programme adjustments.

He was also part of the core team involved in differential planning exercises for specific regions and inputs into annual workplans and budgets under Samagra Shiksha.

The combination of policy drafting, technical system design, and training work suggests a professional who is comfortable at both senior-policy and ground-operations levels, and who takes ownership across that full range rather than limiting himself to one end.

### World Bank - Education systems and analytical work

With the World Bank, Gurjot has supported school education and skills-sector work across India since July 2023. His responsibilities include data analysis, public finance assessments, operational support, consultations with government stakeholders, and support for lending and analytical work.

One of his major works has been education financing and value-for-money analysis. He conducted a comprehensive public finance analysis of Samagra Shiksha—using time-series data on budget demands and approvals to examine how allocations translated into real spending over time, where purchasing power had eroded, and how per-student expenditure varied across states and levels of schooling. The analysis helped surface equity and efficiency concerns in fund distribution and informed discussions on the design of the scheme’s next iteration.

He also supported the development of an upcoming externally aided programme in Assam aimed at improving foundational learning outcomes and strengthening school-to-work transitions for adolescents. This work combined field visits, literature review, data analysis, and stakeholder consultations to identify gaps in quality, access, and infrastructure, and to support alignment with SDG 4.1 targets. As part of this engagement, he worked closely with the Government of Assam to analyse the existing school network alongside demographic trends, contributing to a school upgradation strategy grounded in projected demand and on-ground realities.

A concrete example of his ability to move fast is illustrative here. When the project team was working through the school network analysis, the available data was large and the team was struggling to manage it reliably in Excel. Gurjot brought in his skills in Python and SQL to build a reproducible, modifiable, and accurate analytical system from scratch. The shift allowed the project preparation to proceed in record time and with greater confidence in the outputs. This kind of move – identifying a technical bottleneck, owning the solution, and delivering it quickly – reflects a broader pattern across his career.

In parallel, he examined enrolment trends and fund utilisation at Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) across multiple fiscal years. The analysis focused on unit economics and expenditure patterns, highlighting high per-seat costs, declining enrolments, and structural inefficiencies that raised questions about the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of vocational education financing.

This work indicates a strong ability to combine economics, policy, and public administration, especially where the goal is to improve learning outcomes through smarter resourcing and more effective implementation.

### Education programme design and evaluation

Before and alongside his larger institutional roles, Gurjot worked with IgnusERG on education quality improvement, programme evaluation, curriculum development, and training. His work included research studies, capacity-building workshops, online professional development programmes for teachers, and technology-assisted approaches to large-scale data collection and analysis. 

This part of his background shows versatility. He is not limited to policy writing or analytics alone; he also works on learning design, field processes, and implementation support. He has experience creating practical materials for teachers, students, supervisors, and other stakeholders, particularly in contexts where education systems need support in foundational learning, literacy, and pandemic-era adaptation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked on the design and delivery of large-scale online professional development programmes for teachers and education resource persons. One such programme—among the first large-scale efforts of its kind—was implemented in Rajasthan in partnership with the state government and UNICEF, and was accessed by over 100,000 teachers through the UniLearn platform. A similar programme was subsequently developed for the 300-member State Resource Group of the Department of Basic Education, Government of Uttar Pradesh. Across these engagements, he was responsible for designing and delivering the technical framework, co-creating course content, analysing participant engagement data, providing client-side implementation support, and conducting live sessions with over 4,000 participants. These programmes were zero-to-one builds—created under significant time pressure, in highly uncertain conditions, with no established playbook. His ability to define quality standards early and hold to them while adapting everything else around them was central to their success.

### Programme evaluation and research

Gurjot has led and contributed to several standalone evaluation and research studies.

In 2024–25, he led a **cost-effectiveness evaluation of UNESCO MGIEP’s education programmes**, examining how financial inputs translated into short- and longer-term outcomes across five projects implemented in South Africa, Cameroon, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan. The analysis combined programme costing with outcome evidence from MGIEP’s internal evaluations to understand not just whether the initiatives worked, but how efficiently they did so in very different contexts. Findings were framed to surface key drivers of cost-effectiveness, clarify trade-offs, and support practical decision-making about future scale and design.

In 2021, he worked on a **multi-state study for Breakthrough Trust** examining the social norms and youth perceptions that shape support systems for violence against women and girls in India. He led the quantitative analysis and supported the research design and report writing, drawing on perspectives from young people and service providers across five states. The analytical work involved balancing statistical patterns with the limits of what the data could reasonably claim, and framing results to inform coordinated action by women’s rights organisations at the South Asia level.

In 2019, he worked as part of a cross-sectoral team on a **national study for Central Square Foundation** examining the status of foundational learning programmes in India. The study combined document review, budget analysis, and interviews with government functionaries and practitioners across six states. He contributed to the mixed-methods analysis and co-authored both the programme report and the policy brief, translating diverse state experiences into phased, actionable policy asks. The findings informed subsequent government and organisational discussions on foundational learning in the lead-up to and after the National Education Policy 2020.

## Capacity building

A recurring thread across Gurjot’s career is building the practical capacity of government and institutional teams to work with data and evidence. Beyond the COVID-19 programmes noted above, this includes:

- A **training framework and five-module digital course** on data management for MIS and data functionaries in the School Education Department, Government of West Bengal—covering Excel, data visualisation, Google Forms, and Google Sheets—hosted on UNICEF India’s UniLearn platform and accessed by over 500 school- and block-level functionaries.
- An **in-house methods workshop at UNESCO MGIEP** following the cost-effectiveness evaluation, focusing on how similar evaluations could be undertaken internally given real-world data constraints.
- A **workshop on evidence-informed policymaking** for researchers and functionaries from the Tribal Development Department, Government of West Bengal, covering what constitutes evidence, how to analyse and present data, and how data can support policy implementation.
- Support for the storyboarding, content visualisation, and learning management system setup for a **digital course on gender sensitisation** for forest officials in India, funded by USAID.
- Facilitation of **over 30 capacity-building workshops** for students, teachers, and supervisors in the education sector, spanning topics from early language development to data-assisted field processes.

Each of these was designed and delivered end-to-end, not handed off. That ownership over delivery is part of why the outputs have tended to stick.

## Independent work and public projects

Outside formal consulting, Gurjot has built a portfolio of independent projects that reinforce his identity as a builder.

Some of the clearest themes are:
- **public data access and analysis**,
- **education systems documentation**,
- **workflow and productivity tools**,
- and **interactive or explanatory software**. 

His personal site lists projects such as Data for Education Systems, a resource developed under a Mozilla-USAID grant; analytics and scraping work on Indian public datasets; a budget game with the Accountability Initiative; and tools like Protein Calculator, Deadline, Buzee, and Chachi. These projects show both range and consistency: he repeatedly returns to the same core problem of making information more usable for real people. Notably, these are not speculative or half-finished—they are shipped products, most of which he built alone, often quickly.

**Data for Education Systems** was developed as part of a fellowship supported by USAID, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Aapti Institute. The resource focuses on improving how education data is designed, interpreted, and used in Indian school education systems, shifting attention from data collection and compliance toward data-to-action.

**Buzee** is an open-source, cross-platform full-text search application he built to solve a persistent practical problem: finding the right document at the right moment across large, unstructured folders. The project received wide attention after being discussed on the front page of Hacker News.

**Chachi** was an EdTech startup he founded during the first COVID-19 school lockdown. It was an activity generator designed to prompt reflection, conversation, and skill-building through well-designed questions. The product was used by over 12,000 users across India before being wound down, giving him first-hand experience with product design, iteration, and the realities of early-stage EdTech. Building and winding down Chachi also sharpened something that shows up across his professional work: the ability to make clear-headed decisions under uncertainty, set a bar for what good looks like, and move quickly toward it.

He also led the content creation process for a flashcard-based learning app at an early-stage startup, working closely with the product and engineering teams to translate learning goals into structured digital content.

His GitHub profile adds another layer. It shows public repositories including a full-text search app, an OCR command-line tool, and a data scraper for environmental data. Even in these projects, the pattern is the same: build something useful, usually around information retrieval, text, or data extraction.

## Data infrastructure work

Beyond his main policy and education focus, Gurjot has contributed to data infrastructure projects that draw on the same underlying skills—working with messy information, improving structure and clarity, and making material usable.

He has supported research teams by designing and executing data discovery and collection processes where information was not readily available in clean formats. This includes scraping and consolidating air quality data from CPCB servers and mortality data from municipal corporation websites for the Sustainable Futures Collective, work which fed into peer-reviewed research published in *The Lancet*. He also supported the team at the Accountability Initiative at Centre for Policy Research by extracting, cleaning, and documenting beneficiary, operational, and financial data from government portals and reports, enabling cross-state and over-time analysis of major government schemes. In both cases, the value came not just from technical execution but from the speed and accuracy with which he turned difficult, unstructured data into something researchers could actually use.

## Editorial work

Gurjot has provided editorial and structural inputs to research communication and learning materials where content needed to balance technical accuracy with accessibility. For Breakthrough Trust, he supported the editing and development of assessment frameworks, workbooks, and toolkits on themes such as digital safety, positive masculinity, and parenting, produced as part of a UNICEF-supported programme. He also provided content structure and editorial support for the *Toolkit on Gender and Sexuality* developed by the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University, focusing on demystifying terminology, supporting inclusive language, and ensuring the document functioned as an accessible starting point for its intended audience.

## Writing and ideas

Gurjot’s Rough Copy site makes it clear that writing is not just a side hobby; it is part of how he thinks. The site contains notes, charts, policy observations, and education-focused explorations. The tone is practical and exploratory rather than purely academic, which fits his broader profile: he seems interested in explaining systems, testing ideas, and making policy analysis more legible.

Across his website and writing, he returns often to themes such as:
- education reform,
- data systems,
- government budgets,
- analytics for decision-making,
- and the challenge of turning evidence into action.

He also appears to enjoy the craft of explanation—whether that means a chart, a blog post, a data guide, or a product description. That ability to translate complexity into something readable is one of the strongest through-lines in his profile.

## Interests

From the public sites and the work history, Gurjot’s interests seem to cluster around a few areas:

**Education systems and policy.** He is deeply engaged with school education, equity, learning outcomes, vocational training, and the governance of large public systems.

**Data and evidence.** He uses data to support policy, design dashboards, analyze budgets, and build decision-support tools.

**Software and automation.** His projects show regular experimentation with web apps, scraping, text extraction, and productivity software.

**Writing and sensemaking.** Through Rough Copy, newsletter-style writing, and explainers, he clearly enjoys unpacking ideas and making them understandable.

**Books and learning.** His personal site also highlights reading as a live part of his intellectual life, including books on complexity, memory, economics, and philosophy.

## Skills

Gurjot’s skill set is broad, but it clusters neatly into a few categories.

### Policy and strategy
He can develop policy notes, concept papers, technical briefs, and implementation guidance. He has worked with senior government officials and development partners, which suggests strong stakeholder management and policy communication skills. Critically, he does not just develop recommendations—he owns the delivery of the work those recommendations depend on.

### Data and analysis
He is experienced in statistical analysis, public finance analysis, monitoring and evaluation, program evaluation, and research design. His technical toolkit includes both software development tools (Python, R, SQL, HTML, JavaScript) and consulting analysis tools like Excel. That technical range is not incidental: it allows him to move significantly faster than most policy consultants and to reduce dependence on others when speed matters.

### Stakeholder alignment and navigation
Working in and with government has made him adept at navigating the gap between decision-makers and implementors. He is attuned to where misalignments emerge—between what is decided and what is understood, between what is planned and what is resourced—and he works actively to close those gaps. This is distinct from stakeholder management in the conventional sense; it is about ensuring that the right people are pulling in the same direction.

### Systems and implementation
He has built MIS dashboards, data management protocols, monitoring frameworks, and reporting structures. This indicates practical systems thinking, not just abstract analysis. 

### Working under uncertainty
Government consulting involves constant change—shifting priorities, interrupted timelines, personnel transitions. Gurjot manages this by setting clear quality standards and success criteria early, then staying anchored to those while adapting how he gets there. That discipline lets him stay effective even when the environment around a project is unstable.

### Communication and documentation
He writes reports, notes, workshop materials, training content, and explanatory documentation. He is also comfortable presenting to senior stakeholders and facilitating workshops. 

### Software development
His technical skills include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Svelte, Node.js, WordPress, and SQLite, alongside full-stack and data-focused project work. His GitHub profile and personal site suggest practical familiarity with shipping small-to-medium digital products, and doing so quickly.

## Education

Gurjot holds an **MSc in Physics from ETH Zurich** and a **BSc (Honours) in Physics from Delhi University**. That background helps explain the analytical, quantitative, and structured way he approaches both policy and technology—as well as a habit of defining problems clearly before reaching for solutions.

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*Prepared from Gurjot’s CV, work history, and public web presence using LLM tools on 26th March, 2026.*

Sources:
- https://thatgurjot.com
- https://linkedin.com/in/thatgurjot
- https://github.com/gsidhu