Washington: Indian academician Prajapati Trivedi has been elected as a fellow of the prestigious National Academy of Public Administration in the US, becoming the first Indian to be bestowed with this honour.

NAPA is an independent, non-profit and non-partisan organisation established by the US Congress in 1967 to assist government leaders in building more effective, efficient, accountable and transparent organisations.

Trivedi, 64, is the first Indian academic to have been elected as Fellow to America’s National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), considered the highest recognition internationally in the field of public administration.

Trivedi is currently Senior Fellow (Governance) and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, Indian School of Business (ISB).

In addition to his current assignment with ISB, he is a Visiting Fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington DC, and Visiting Economics Faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Prior to joining ISB from 2009-2014, he worked as a Secretary to the Government of India in the Cabinet Secretariat, where he was responsible for designing a highly regarded whole-of-government performance monitoring and evaluation system for government departments and reporting the results to the Prime Minister.

“It is indeed the greatest professional recognition I have ever received and am humbled by it, particularly because I am the first Indian to have this singular honor,” Trivedi said in an email statement.

In August this year, he was also appointed as a member of the NAPA Project Panel to prepare a White Paper on the use of data and analytics to improve organisational health and performance within government agencies.

The white paper has been commissioned by the Office of Management and Budget, the department leading the US President’s government-wide management reform effort.

The induction ceremony is scheduled for November 16 and 17 in Washington DC.