Dr O.P. Agarwal is a Distinguished Fellow at Artha Global and NITI Aayog, a Senior Advisor to the World Bank and Professor of Practice at the Indian School of Public Policy and also at IIT Roorkee.

OP is a highly respected thinker and practitioner with a wealth of experience in cities, urban transport, climate change and related development and environment issues. He was the CEO of the World Resources Institute from June 2017 to September 2022. He was a member of the Indian Administrative Service from 1979 to 2007. He held several positions with the national and state government of Assam, including Joint Secretary (Training) in the national Dept of Personnel and Training and Secretary for Transport in the State of Assam. He was the principal author of the National Urban Transport Policy for the country, which was adopted in 2006 and has remained the key document guiding urban transport investments since then. He was also the principal architect of the current system of mid-career training of IAS officers which was adopted in 2005 and continues to be the pattern even today. He worked with the World Bank for 6 years as its global Urban Transport Adviser in Washington DC, where he chaired the U.S. Transport Research Board’s Committee on Transportation in Developing Countries.

He has a PhD in Transport Economics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, a Master’s degree in Transportation and in Technology Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.