Pawan Agarwal is a civil servant from the Indian Administrative Services. He is currently Principal Secretary to the Government of West Bengal. He has earlier served as Director in the Indian government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development, as well as Financial Advisor and Coordinator of New Initiatives for India’s University Grants Commission - a position in which he developed substantial expertise in higher education policy and practice, and gained a broad understanding of the issues and challenges faced by India’s colleges and universities.

During the year 2005-06, he was a Fulbright New Century Scholar on higher education from India. He was also affiliated to the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). In course of his affiliation, he undertook a comprehensive review of Indian higher education, which was released by ICRIER as a working paper. An enlarged and updated version was published as a book, Indian Higher Education – Envisioning the future by Sage in 2009.

He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, at the India-China-America Institute at Emory University, USA, and at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at University of Melbourne.

Pawan Agarwal is participating in the Is internationalisation a western construct? session.