Abhilaksh Likhi has more than twenty five years of experience in the Indian Administrative Service, India's premier civil service. He is a Fulbright scholar, holds a Masters in International Public Policy from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, and has a PhD in Development Communication from Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. Currently, he serves as Principal Secretary, Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare in the Government of Haryana in India.
Prior to that post, he was a Senior Fellow at the South Asia Studies, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, working in the area of community driven development, decentralized local governance and participatory communication. He has worked both in senior field and policy formulation levels in the federal and provincial governments of India. Besides working in sectors such as public relations, information & cultural affairs, school education, urban development and municipal administration, he also has vast operational experience in the sector of rural development. Therein, his responsibilities included state wide implementation, management and supervision of rural poverty reduction and infrastructure development programs; regulation and monitoring of the multi-tier cooperative banking structure that provides agricultural loans to farmers; empowerment of decentralized democratic rural self-government institutions; policy formulation and licensing for community radio to foster voice, accountability and transparency in rural areas.
Besides contributing articles to national journals and daily newspapers, he also presented a paper titled, “Community Radio in Rural India: Forging a Public- Private Partnership to Empower Civil Society” held at the Third International Conference on Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in August, 2008. His research paper titled " Community Driven Development in Developing Countries: The Need For Community Radio in Supporting Access, Voice and Accountability" was published in the Occasional Paper Series in May, 2013 by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF). ORF is a public policy think tank based in New Delhi. He has also been a Short-Term Consultant at the World Bank in the HDN Knowledge Management and South Asia Sustainable and Livelihoods Divisions.