About Abhilash Puljal

There are corridors of global trade and investment that most advisers discuss from a distance. I work inside them.

For over two decades, I have operated at the intersection of India, Africa, and Asia — advising governments, multilateral agencies, development finance institutions, and private enterprises on how to move capital, structure deals, navigate regulation, and build ventures that hold in markets where the playbook does not yet exist.

The work is not theoretical. I conceptualised the Kigali Innovation City in Rwanda, designed SITA — the first South-South Cooperation project commissioned by DFID — advised on the Lobito Corridor trade facilitation framework across Zambia, the DRC and Angola, developed Sri Lanka's National Export Strategy, and advised the UN World Food Programme on agricultural value chains across Asia and Africa.

What connects these engagements is a consistent question: how do you translate strategic intent into something executable across borders, regulatory systems, and institutional contexts that rarely cooperate? That translation — between policy and commerce, between institutional ambition and market reality — is what I do.

Today, through Expectation State, I work with private sector firms, governments, and investment partners on the cross-border strategy, deal structuring, and market entry work that makes the India–Africa and India–Asia corridors commercially viable. As Co-Director of the LSE India Foundation, I lead the work of bringing one of the world's great social science universities closer to India — and India closer to the world.

I write fortnightly on corridor strategy, trade intelligence, and cross-border investment in The Corridor Dispatch. Practitioner notes, not policy papers.