Nikita Singla is a nonresident scholar in the Carnegie South Asia Program. She is an international trade, logistics, and inclusion specialist with twelve years of experience in South Asia. She has experience of working across more than forty ports in the South Asia region.

She has been leading the Ministry of Finance’s Time Release Study—an annual assessment of cargo clearance at fifteen ports in India for the last five years, and conducted a similar trade facilitation assessment for the land ports in Bangladesh. She is a consultant to the World Bank’s Trade, Transport and Regional Integration practices. She is also a visiting fellow 2024 to the Stimson Centre’s South Asia program.

She has authored the recently published policy paper, titled “Women’s Inclusion in India’s Trade Ecosystem,” supported by the U.S. Embassy in India and the Asia Foundation. She has extensively written on India-Pakistan trade, 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 member of the Advisory Council of TalentNomics India and sits on the panel of experts at the Centre for Trade Excellence, Singapore. She is an engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Masters in International Economic Policy from Sciences Po Paris.