Ideas of India

This is the 2026 job market series, where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India. On this episode, I spoke with  Kishen Shastry  who is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Judge Business School. He received his Ph. D. in economics in 2026 at the University of Cambridge where his research focus...

This is the 2026 job market series, where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India. On this episode, I spoke with Nisha Vernekar who is a PhD Candidate in Economics at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research focus is at the intersection of gender, education, labour economics and development economics. We discussed her job market...

This is the 2026 job market series, where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India. We are launching our series with  Aishwarya Kekre , who is a PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of Virginia. Her research focus is at the intersection development, trade and spatial Economics. We discussed her job market paper, "Barriers to Structur...

Today my guest is Rana Hasan who is the Director, Centre for Economic Growth at NCAER and Senior Affiliate Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Prior to this he was the Regional Lead Economist at the Asian Development Bank. We talked about how to classify and define a city, coordination problems in urban governance, their potential as engines of growth and employment, land use regulation, and how citie...

Today my guest is Gaurav Chiplunkar , who is an Assistant Professor in the Global Economies and Markets group at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia . We talked about labor market frictions in India, understanding the reasons for low female labor force participation in India, the importance of information flows and networks, the role of middlemen, and much more. Recorded July 8th...

Today my guests are my colleagues Shreyas Narla and Kadambari Shah . Shreyas is a research scholar and Kadambari is a research associate at the Mercatus Center with the India program. We talked about completing five years of the 1991 Project , how it started, it's scope, the oral histories of the reformers in 1991, papers, essays, fellowships and much more.  Recorded July 10th, 2026. Read a  full...

Today my guest is M.R. Madhavan , co-founder and president of PRS Legislative Research . We talked about the role and purpose of the Rajya Sabha, treatment of money bills in a Westminster system, how the anti-defection law and party whips have hollowed out parliamentary function, parliamentary procedure, the role of the governor, and much more. Recorded June 24th, 2026. Read a  full transcript  en...

Today my guest is once again Rahul Sagar , who is a Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. We talked about his new book The Birth of Indian Liberalism , the recovery of the forgotten nineteenth-century thinker Mama Parmanand, why his Letters to an Indian Raja counts as the first work of Indian political theory, how Indian liberals had to justify b...

Today my guest is  Sajjid Chinoy , managing director and chief India economist at J.P. Morgan. He is also currently serving as a part-time member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. Sajjid previously served on the Advisory Council to India's 15th Finance Commission and has served on a number of expert committees of the Reserve Bank of India. We talked about India's cur...

Today my guest is Ritam Chaurey , who is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies . We talked about structural transformation in India over the last three decades, how firm level behavior responds to regulatory and fiscal changes, how firms choose between capital and labor, or permanent versus contractual labor, land use and factory location, an...

Today my guest is Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who is the Laurance Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and former president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. He is the author of various books and edited volumes, has served on various government committees, and is a columnist for the Indian Express. We talked about the return of nihilism in polit...

Today we are releasing a webinar recording from April 24th where  Milan Vaishnav  and I had a conversation on delimitation in India. Milan is a senior fellow and the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also the host of the excellent  Grand Tamasha  podcast  where this recording will be simultaneously released.  We talked about the failure to...

Today my guest is Samanth Subramanian, who is a journalist and writer and the author of the recent books The Web Beneath the Waves and   A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane . We talked about under water sea cables and choke points in critical global infrastructure, the intersection of technology and geopolitics, large language models, JBS Haldane and...

Today my guests are Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur.  Arvind  is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India.  Devesh  is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies and Director of the Asia Programs at the Johns Hopkins. They are co-authors of the recent book,  A Sixth of Humanity: Independent I...

Today my guest is  Dr. V Anantha Nageswaran , who is currently serving as the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He is also the co-author of the books  Economics of Derivatives   and  The Rise of Finance: Causes, Consequences and Cures .   We talked about import substitution and strategic resilience, futures and options market, gross fixed capital formation, crypto markets, India's...

Today my guests are  Ornit Shani  and  Rohit De , historians and the authors of the latest book  Assembling India's Constitution .  Ornit Shani is an associate professor of history at the University of Haifa and the author of  How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise . Rohit De is an associate professor of history at Yale University and the author of  A Pe...

Today my guest is  Pranay Kotasthane  who is the deputy director of the Takshashila Institution and chairs the  High Tech Geopolitics Programme .  Pranay co-writes  Anticipating the Unintended,  a newsletter on public policy ideas and frameworks, and co-hosts  Puliyabaazi ,  a popular Hindi-Urdu podcast on politics, policy, and technology. He is the co-author of  -  Missing in Action: Why Should Y...

Today my guest is  Nachiket Mor , a health economist whose work focuses on the design of national and regional health systems. He is a visiting scientist at the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at IIIT Bangalore, and a commissioner and author on the  Lancet Citizens' Commission on Reimagining India's...

Today my guest is  Akshay Jaitly , the author of the recent book,  Trilegal: The Making of a Modern Indian Law Firm . He is one of the founders of Trilegal and specializes in advising on energy and infrastructure projects. His research interests include power sector reform, the energy transition and public-private contracting. We talked about how Trilegal grew in the context of India's market libe...

Today my guest is   Renuka Sane   who is the managing director of Managing Director of  Trustbridge . An institution that seeks to improve India's business environment by improving the rule of law. Renuka was a member of many expert committees including: the Task Force of Experts set up by the Employees Provident Fund Organisation; the research team of the Bankruptcy Legislative Reforms Commission...

Today my guest is Snigdha Poonam  who is a journalist and writer. She is the author of the new book  Scamlands  and also the author of the 2018 award winning book  Dreamers : How Young Indians Are Changing Their World. We talked about the scam industrial complex in different states like Jharkhand,  Assam and Tamil Nadu in India, the interaction between the scam economy and the formal economy, the...

Shruti and Ideas of India producer Dallas Floer sit down for the 2025 end-of-year episode. They look back at key themes and top episodes from the past year, address listener questions, and look forward to what's in store for Shruti and the show in 2026. Recorded December 16th, 2025. Read a  full transcript  enhanced with helpful links. Learn more about The 1991 Fellowship . Connect with Ideas of I...

Our seventh and final scholar in the series is  Ammu Lavanya , a PhD candidate in Economics at George Washington University. Her research is in the areas of International Finance, Monetary Economics, Empirical Banking and Financial History. We spoke about her job market paper titled International Financial Flows, Credit Allocation and Productivity . We talked about financial liberalization in Indi...

Our sixth scholar in the series is  Nayantara Biswas is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She received her Ph. D. in economics from Clark University. Her research focuses on health equity impact evaluations of small-scale interventions and large-scale public policies. We spoke about dissertation titled, The Impact of Social Policies on Reproductive Health,...

Our fifth scholar in the series is Karthik Narayan , who is a doctoral candidate in Economics at Nuffield College and at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford.   His research focuses on monetary policy, macroeconomics and finance in developing countries. We spoke about his job market paper titled, Macroeconomic Effects of Scheduled and Unscheduled Monetary Policy Surprises. We talked a...