Smriti Sharma MIDP’14: Seeing the Full Story

Smriti Sharma (MIDP’14) has built a career around understanding the full story.

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Today, as Head of Policy & Strategy at Apple in India, she works at the intersection of government, business, and global economic systems, helping shape conversations on issues ranging from manufacturing and supply chains to technology and regulation. But long before she stepped into policy leadership, Sharma spent nearly a decade as a journalist, reporting on many of the same forces she now helps navigate.

That early experience continues to define her approach. With a master’s degree in broadcast journalism, Sharma developed a sharp instinct for asking questions, connecting perspectives, and examining how decisions play out in the real world. At Sanford, she built on that foundation, gaining the analytical tools to move beyond observation and into deeper engagement with how and why policy decisions are made.

Since graduating from Sanford’s Master of International Development Policy (MIDP) program in 2014, Sharma has worked across research institutions, international organizations, industry groups, and global companies, including leadership roles at Amazon and now Apple. Her work reflects a consistent focus on collaboration across sectors and borders, grounded in the belief that the most effective solutions emerge when diverse perspectives come together.

In her responses below, Sharma reflects on how Sanford shaped her thinking, why public policy matters more than ever, and the values that continue to guide her work.

What impact has Sanford had on your professional and/or personal journey?

My time at the Sanford School of Public Policy came after almost a decade in journalism. As a journalist in India, I had spent years reporting on governments, business decisions, economic reforms, and political developments. Journalism gave me extraordinary access to events as they unfolded, but over time I became increasingly aware that while I could explain what had happened, I often wanted to understand more deeply why institutions behaved the way they did and why certain policy choices survived while others did not. That is where Sanford had a profound impact on me.

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Courses in public policy analysis, economics, international trade, and cost-benefit analysis gave me a much sharper framework for understanding how decisions are made inside institutions. I began to understand policy not simply as an outcome, but as a negotiation shaped by incentives, competing interests, institutional capacity, and political judgment.
What Sanford also taught me was intellectual discipline. It trained me to ask harder questions: Who benefits? Who bears the cost? What assumptions are built into a policy? What happens when implementation meets political reality? The experience changed the way I think to this day. It made my understanding more granular, but also more humble, because one quickly learns that policy choices are rarely neat. Very often, they involve choosing between imperfect options.

Most importantly, Sanford helped shift me from being a relatively dispassionate observer of public affairs into someone better equipped to participate in policy conversations with greater depth and responsibility.

Why does public policy matter in 2026 and beyond?

When I graduated in 2014 with a degree in public policy, the profession did not yet occupy the space it does today.
At that time, public policy as a field was still not widely understood outside certain institutional circles. Public policy professionals were often loosely defined - sometimes seen as generalists, sometimes confused with advocacy professionals, sometimes simply viewed as intermediaries between sectors.

Today public policy has become indispensable not only within governments but also in corporations, think tanks, and international institutions, because many of the defining questions of our time cannot be solved through a single lens.
Whether one is dealing with digital regulation, industrial policy, supply chains, or technology governance, economics alone is not enough, law alone is not enough, and politics alone is not enough. Public policy matters because it forces these disciplines to speak to one another.

What I value about the field is that it teaches us that no single stakeholder holds all the answers. Governments, businesses, researchers, and civil society often see different parts of the same problem, and effective policy emerges when those perspectives are brought into structured dialogue.

This matters even more in 2026 because we are living through a period of geopolitical uncertainty where decisions made in one country increasingly affect others. Tariffs, technology controls, energy transitions, and digital governance all now travel across borders.

Public policy professionals today therefore need to think beyond immediate outcomes and examine second-order consequences, both domestic and global.

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What is the most interesting highlight so far in your career?

One of the most interesting things about my career is that it has unfolded alongside India’s own economic evolution.

I entered policy practice at a time when India was beginning to rethink how it approached industrial growth, manufacturing, and integration with the global economy. My work in the technology sector has involved engaging with the government on issues linked to manufacturing frameworks, taxation, industrial competitiveness, and supply chains.

What makes this meaningful is that these are not isolated corporate questions. They sit within a larger national ambition: how does India position itself more strongly in global production networks while creating domestic jobs, building skills, and strengthening industrial capability?

A particularly rewarding aspect has been watching the change in how global value chains are perceived. There was a time when they were often viewed with suspicion, as structures that might weaken domestic capacity. Increasingly, they are now understood as vehicles through which technology, knowledge, and production discipline can be absorbed locally and scaled.

To contribute to policy discussions during that shift has been deeply satisfying because one can see the practical consequences - new manufacturing capacity, new employment, and a stronger place for India in electronics manufacturing.

Terry Sanford implored students to “stand for something.” What do you stand for?

I stand for openness over isolation.

I believe countries grow stronger when they remain open to the movement of ideas, talent, labour, technology, and knowledge. Isolation may create the appearance of control, but over time it often narrows opportunity. I also believe countries must build on their own strengths, but without losing the willingness to learn from others. Some of the best policy ideas emerge not from imitation, but from carefully studying what has worked elsewhere and adapting it intelligently.

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At a broader level, I stand for constructive engagement between institutions that are often assumed to be in conflict - government, business, and non-government actors. In practice, the most durable solutions usually emerge when these groups understand one another’s constraints and work toward outcomes that serve larger social interests rather than narrow institutional positions.

Finally, I stand for a public policy culture that takes ideas seriously: one that identifies challenges carefully, researches rigorously, debates honestly, and recommends solutions with intellectual integrity.

What seeds of change are you planting in your community?

What matters increasingly to me now is helping younger professionals entering public policy find confidence in their own voice.

Every generation brings a different vocabulary, a different instinct, and often a different sense of urgency. I think it is important that those entering the field inherit institutional memory without feeling bound by it.

I try to share what my own journey has taught me, but I also consciously learn from younger professionals, their ways of framing questions, their comfort with new technologies, and their willingness to challenge assumptions.

I do not believe experience should become resistance to change. If anything, experience should help create better bridges between what has worked in the past and what needs to evolve.

The seeds of change I hope to contribute to are therefore continuity, curiosity, and intellectual openness, so that those coming after us feel equipped not only to inherit systems, but to improve them.