India Speak: The CPR Podcast

In the twenty fifth episode of CPR ThoughtSpace Richa Bansal talks to Senior Fellow, Shubhagato Dasgupta and Fellow, Arkaja Singh, about deaths due to manual scavenging in India. Despite laws that prohibit the act of manual scavenging, the practice is rampant in India. The conversation highlights the lack of proper sanitation infrastructure, poor implementation of laws, and elaborates on the reaso...

As the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) completes 4 years on 2nd October, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, it becomes essential to study and understand the progress the Mission has made so far. In the twenty fourth episode of CPR ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Devashish Deshpande, Senior Research Associate at the Accountability Initiative (AI) at CPR about AI's new study on the decla...

In the twenty third episode of CPR ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Bharat Karnad, Research Professor at CPR about his new book 'Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition'. The book analyses Prime Minister Modi's foreign and military policies in the context of India's evolving socio-political and economic milieu, global power politics featuring other strongmen-alpha male lea...

In the twenty second episode of CPR ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Amb G Parthasarathy, Honorary Research Professor at CPR and former Ambassador to Pakistan, to discuss the Pakistan election results. Amb Parthasarathy delves into the role of the army in the governance of Pakistan and the future of India-Pakistan relations with Imran Khan elected as the new Prime Minister of the country. Music...

In the twenty first episode of CPR ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Srinath Raghavan, a Senior Fellow at CPR, to discuss his new book 'The Most Dangerous Place'. The book presents a gripping account of America's political and strategic, economic and cultural presence in South Asia since 1776. By illuminating the patterns of the past, this sweeping history also throws light on the challenges of...

Small towns have remained an important feature of the Indian urban system. In this episode of CPR's podcast, Richa Bansal speaks to Dr Partha Mukhopadhyay from CPR and Professor Surinder Jodhka from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, drawing on their research in the Madhubani district of Bihar, to understand the various aspects of social and economic transformations taking place in rural areas and s...

Persis Taraporevala and Ankit Bhardwaj, both research associates at CPR, have conducted extensive research on the Smart Cities Mission across multiple states - both through empirical research of sixty Indian cities combined with intensive fieldwork across four cities. In this episode of CPR’s podcast, Richa Bansal talks to Taraporevala and Bhardwaj as they draw on their research to contextualise a...

Corruption is a systemic problem in India and a recently released report categorised states in India by their level of corruption. T R Raghunanadan, an advisor to the Accountability Initiative at CPR, is a pioneer on corruption work and was the programme head of the first website launched to address the issue called ipaidabribe.com. In this episode of CPR's podcast, Richa Bansal talks to Raghunand...

Agnes Deboulet, a Sociology professor at Université Paris-VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis co-authored a book titled 'Rethinking Precarious Neighbourhoods' along with Véronique Dupont, a Senior Visiting Fellow at CPR, and Solomon Benjamin, Associate Professor at IIT, Madras. In this episode of CPR's podcast, Richa Bansal talks to Deboulet to unpack the concept of precarious neighbuorhoods, as studied in...

Manju Menon, Senior Fellow at CPR, leads research on environmental justice with her team, in collaboration with another organisation called Namati. In this episode of CPR's podcast, Richa Bansal talks to Menon to unpack her research, including the context; how the research is put to action on the ground through training personnel to find solutions; and the impact this action research project has h...

The Land Rights Initiative at CPR recently completed a study of Supreme Court cases on land acquisition in India from 1950 to 2016. This study examines land disputes along various metrics, as well as analyses litigation under the newly enacted Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (LARR Act) for the three year period, 2014 to 201...

President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to promote US energy independence and economic growth, which can potentially damage global efforts to limit climate change. Navroz Dubash, a Senior Fellow at CPR, unpacks the implications of this order further, explaining how it will impact India's strategic interests, as well as the role India can play going forward. Music: The Jazz Piano...

The Brahmaputra is a river of great strategic significance to both China and India at many levels, and therefore contentious, especially given that China is the source country for it. Nimmi Kurian is an Associate Professor at CPR with particular expertise in the India-China water dialogue and transborder governance. In this episode of the podcast, Kurian deconstructs the importance of the Brahmapu...

The Uttar Pradesh (UP) state elections of 2017 saw the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, script an unprecedented and unexpected landslide victory in the state. In this episode of the podcast CPR researchers Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi, and Ashish Ranjan, who spent months conducting intensive field research, draw on their experience and analyse av...

Can the poor in India access quality healthcare? What are the barriers and the potential solutions? In this episode of the podcast, Dr Jishnu Das, a Senior Visiting Fellow at CPR and lead economist in the Development Research Group at The World Bank, draws on 15 years of research and extensive field-work to shed light on these issues. Music: The Jazz Piano - Bensound.com

The place you live in have has a huge impact on your life. Why are some places in the world, and indeed even within the same country, characterised by better social service provision and welfare outcomes than others? Why have Indian states remained worlds apart in their social development, especially if they started at a similar point in history, if their trajectories were to be traced, such as in...

The government of India is working to bring out a New Education Policy or NEP to meet the needs of a changing India, ensuring quality, innovation, research to make the country a knowledge hub. The draft NEP, which was formulated under the regime of the previous HRD Minister Smriti Irani now lies in a state of flux since the change of guard, and there is a possibility that it could be revisited com...

The Parliamentary Committee, which is probing the government’s decision to demonetise high value notes, recently raised a number of questions before the RBI governor Urijit Patel, and has summoned him later this month. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court case challenging the notes ban, including its legality among other issues, is ongoing. Against this backdrop, CPR Fellow Dr Namita Wahi, the in-hou...

The urban team at the Centre for Policy Research carried out intensive field work over two weeks, where the researchers interviewed workers across categories of informal work in Delhi to understand how they have coped with the impact of demonetisation or ‘notebandi’, as it is commonly called. Senior Researchers Mukta Naik and Ashwin Parulkar and Research Associates Eesha Kunduri and Manish unpack...

The India-Pakistan relationship has been at an all-time low since the Uri attack, with India closely watching the change in guard of the Pakistani army chief, the de-facto power centre there. With the replacement of Raheel Sharif with General Qamar Javed Bajwa last week, who is known to be pro-democracy, a new equation is expected to take shape between the two countries, and the larger geopolitica...

On the night of November 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the withdrawal of 500 and 1000 rupee notes from the market, with immediate effect, with the aim of curbing black money. While this move at demonetisation was hailed with great enthusiasm when announced, the euphoria soon gave way to frustration, anger and resentment, as the ‘inconvenience’ faced by people continued to mount with ba...

Relations between India and China have changed considerably over the past decade as China’s growth rate outpaced India’s, placing both countries in unique and different positions in the current global geopolitical context. This has been most evident in recent times with China’s open opposition to India’s NSG membership bid; its blocking India’s move to ban Masood Azhar, among other things, while I...

On November 8, the American electorate voted in Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, a phenomenon that the world is trying to deconstruct. Neelanjan Sircar, a Senior Fellow at CPR and an in-house election expert, who was born and raised in the US, unpacks the results of these presidential elections in this podcast. He both contextualises Donald Trump's victory historically and...

India’s bureaucracy has been her Achilles heel, often described as ‘corrupt’, ‘lazy’, ‘ineffective’ and more. And the reason for why the best-intentioned policies do not get implemented successfully on the ground. 70 years after independence, why are we still struggling with a ‘19th century administrative system in the 21st century’, as defined by Prime Minister Modi? In the second episode of CPR’...

In recent times, several instances of violence against Dalits have brought back India’s focus on caste discrimination. Such instances also dent the claims of progress that Dalits have made with regard to their social and economic conditions. How does one reconcile that even in 2016 Dalits are subjected to violence with the fact that the country has implemented myriad programmes and schemes for the...