She earned a B.A. degree from Lady Shri Ram College for Women of the University of Delhi in 1992 and an M.A. degree in economics from Delhi School of Economics, also of the University of Delhi, in 1994. She completed an M.A. degree at the University of Washington in 1996. In 2001, she got a Ph.D. degree at Princeton University. She won Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Research Award while doing her doctoral research at Princeton.