The 1991 Project

I'm the lead developer for The 1991 Project, working with the India Political Economy team at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University — Shruti Rajagopalan, Kadambari Shah, and Shreyas Narla. I designed and developed the entire public-facing website from scratch.

The Project

The 1991 Project commemorates 30+ years of India's economic liberalization — one of the most significant economic transformations in modern history. It was launched in July 2021 on the 30th anniversary of the budget speech that liberalized India from socialism. The project aims to preserve primary sources, policy documents, and historical records from this period, and promote discourse on growth-centered economic reforms.

What I've Built

I designed and built the public website at the1991project.com from scratch, working closely with the economists on the team. The site hosts:

• Papers, essays, and op-eds on Indian economic policy
• Podcast conversations and video series (like the Talking Trade series with Arvind Panagariya)
• A public repository of 1991 reforms documents and expert committee reports
• Oral history archives

Key design challenges:

• Long-form content UX: Designed for reading dense historical and policy content
• Global navigation: Making a large, growing document archive actually navigable
• Static build pipelines: Optimized for reliability and fast global delivery

Current Work

I'm building AI-assisted research tools with a RAG pipeline around the document repository to help researchers quickly find relevant primary sources across thousands of documents.

Why It Matters

Working on research infrastructure is different from building consumer products. The users are experts who need flexibility and transparency over polish. I've learned to build systems that expose their workings rather than hiding complexity — researchers want to understand how they got to an answer, not just get an answer.