Nikita Singla

Nikita Singla is a nonresident scholar in the Carnegie South Asia Program. She is an international trade, logistics, and inclusion specialist with thirteen years of experience in South Asia. She has experience of working across more than forty ports in the South Asia region. She has advised the governments of India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka in varying capacities on trade, logistics, and inclusion-related issues.

She has led the Ministry of Finance’s Time Release Study—an annual assessment of cargo clearance at fifteen ports in India for the last five years (2019-2024)—and conducted a similar trade facilitation assessment for the land ports in Bangladesh and Bhutan. She has also written extensively on the prospects of resuming bilateral trade between India and Pakistan, studying it from all angles: “Unilateral Decisions Bilateral Losses,” which focuses on the impact of the suspension of India-Pakistan trade in 2019, “Dubai Angled Triangle,” which focuses on informal trade between the two countries, and “Bridging the Divide,” which focuses on cross-Line of Control trade between the two sides of Kashmir region.

She is a consultant to the World Bank’s trade, transport, and regional integration practices and sits on the panel of experts at the Centre for Trade Excellence, Singapore. She was Quad Infrastructure Fellow 2024 to the U.S. Department of State, focusing on secure and sustainable infrastructure at ports; and visiting fellow 2024 to Stimson Centre’s South Asia program in Washington, DC, where she focused on identifying areas for U.S.-India collaboration in cargo clearance.

She is an engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Masters in international economic policy from Sciences Po Paris.