Gunanka D. Basavaraju is a YIE Research Fellow at Yale Inclusion Economics, based at Yale's Economic Growth Center, where he works on the Meghalaya Payment for Ecosystem Services (MPES) research project. A senior officer of the Indian Forest Service (IFS), he has spent over a decade leading natural resource management programmes in Meghalaya under World Bank, JICA, ADB, and KfW financing, and was part of the state team that led the design and execution of Meghalaya's GREEN PES initiative. Prior to joining the civil services, he worked as a software developer and architect. Gunanka holds a B.E. in Electronics and Communications from R.V. College of Engineering, Bengaluru, and is currently an MPA in Development Practice candidate at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he is a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow and Dean's Distinguished Scholar.