Dr O.P. Agarwal is currently a Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog and also a Professor of Practice at the Indian School of Public Policy, as well as IIT Roorkee. He was a member of the Indian Administrative Service and belonged to the 1979 batch of the Assam–Meghalaya cadre. He held several positions with the central and state governments, including Joint Secretary (Training) in DoPT, Joint Secretary (Urban Transport) in the Ministry of Urban Development and Secretary (Transport) in Assam.

He was the principal author of the National Urban Transport Policy for the country, which was adopted in 2006 and has remained the key document guiding urban transport investments since then. He has worked with the World Bank for six years as its global Urban Transport Adviser in Washington, DC. He also chaired the US Transport Research Board’s committee on Transport in Developing Countries for six years. More recently, he served as the CEO of WRI India from June 2017 to September 2022.

He has a PhD in Transport Economics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, master's degree in Transportation and Technology Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.