Nilesh Rajadhyaksha

Nilesh Rajadhyaksha is the Programme Director for the Urban Strategy Unit (USU) at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. The USU is a multi-project umbrella unit aimed at driving transformative and tactical thinking in the urban sector in India. He also co-coordinates the U20 technical Secretariat at NIUA. Nilesh led the development of Master Plan for Delhi 2041 - one of the largest metropolises in the world. He is an urbanist with more than 18 years of professional experience, working across diverse research and consulting assignments through reputed semi-government, academic and private institutions. His core areas of work are in the domains of urban planning, public private partnerships, municipal reforms and finance, and capacity building. Some of his key professional assignments include development of the first Liveability Standards for Cities (MoHUA), coordination of national capacity building programmes for MoHUA (RCBH and CBUD) and DEA (National PPP Capacity Building Programme), Property Tax Report for the 13th CFC and monitoring of reform implementation under JnNURM. Nilesh is a trained architect from KRVIA (2001) and has a master’s degree in urban planning from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi (2007).