Ideas for India

In a new edition of I4I conversations, Yamini Aiyar is joined by Shrayana Bhattacharya to discuss her new book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi Schools

In a new edition of I4I conversations, Maitreesh Ghatak (London School of Economics) is joined by Karthik Muralidharan (University of California, San Diego) to discuss his new book, Accelerating India's Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance.

India’s population is expected to peak at about 1.7 billion in 2064, and while the current median age is only 28, the share of Indians aged 65 and above will go from 7% to 20% in the next 40 years or so. Has India been able to take advantage of its demographic dividend of a large working-age population, and is the country prepared for the upcoming transition from a young to an ageing population? I...

Over the last few decades, decentralisation has been rapidly spreading in developing countries across the world, with around 35 countries announcing new or deepening decentralisation reforms in recent years. In a new I4I Conversation, Lakshmi Iyer (University of Notre Dame) joins Sarmistha Pal (University of Surrey) and Jean-Paul Faguet (London School of Economics), the editors of ‘Decentralised G...

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns, schools quickly pivoted to online learning. However, there was limited information about whether children had access to learning materials, and what was actually taking place within households. In this edition of I4I Conversations, Rukmini Banerji and Wilima Wadhwa discuss the role that the Annual Status of Education Report (ASE...

India, and many developing nations in other parts of the world take solace in the U-shaped Kuznets curve: a belief in this inverse relationship between income and environmental quality results in not enough efforts being made to tackle pollution and environmental degradation in these countries. There is an urgent need for policy which can protect societies and people from the adverse effects of cl...

With the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, work from home became the norm in 2020. However, even though mobility restrictions have been lifted, many workplaces all over the world continue to follow a model of remote or hybrid working. This has raised questions about worker productivity, work-life balance, and the future of commuting and cities. In this edition of I4I Conversations, Prof. Nirvikar S...

India’s relatively young population, the pace of adoption of smartphones and digital technology, and rapid urbanisation has contributed to the growth of digital labour markets. In recent years, we have seen the proliferation of gig work and labour market platforms like Uber, Urban Company, Swiggy and others. This growth has accelerated in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic with India currently acco...

Public discourse around automation has seen some take a fairly alarmist view – with concerns around its impact on employment, wages, the labour share of national income, and inequality. Others take a more optimistic view – that short-run turbulence and long-run increases in welfare are the typical outcomes of any technological change. In this context, Dilip Mookherjee (Boston University) speaks wi...

Policy responses to Covid-19 have been a mix of fiscal and monetary policy – with the latter doing the heavy-lifting in both developed and developing countries. Against this backdrop, in this edition of I4I Conversations, Viral Acharya (NYU Stern School of Business) and Amartya Lahiri (University of British Columbia) discuss the potential distortions of using ‘band-aids’ instead of structural refo...

Several commentators have lauded the recently presented Budget 2022-23 as a ‘growth budget’, on account of the large allocations made for capital expenditure on public infrastructure. On the other hand, concerns have been expressed about the Budget’s potential to create jobs for the masses, allay inflation worries, and strengthen social sectors such as health and education. Should we be optimistic...

As India is now completing 75 years of Independence, two big questions loom over the conversation around India’s economic development: How successful was the Indian economy before and during colonial rule, as compared to the postcolonial period? What is the role of history – historical events, actors, and institutions – in shaping India’s development trajectory? This is the focus of the sixth edit...

In 2019, the Ministry of Jal Shakti set up a committee of independent experts – led by Dr Mihir Shah – to draft a new National Water Policy. To examine the recommendations made by the Committee, Ashwini Kulkarni speaks with Mihir Shah, beginning with a discussion of the key issues constituting the water crisis facing India today – in terms of dichotomies such as agriculture and industry use, rural...

Published in February 2021 by the UK government, the ‘Dasgupta Review’ calls for changes in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world. Against the backdrop of the Review, in the fourth edition of I4I Conversations, E. Somanathan speaks with Partha Dasgupta, tracing the origins of his interest in environmental economics – a consistent...

How did human society evolve from being organised predominantly around large kin-based networks, to one with strong notions of individualism? To examine this question, Joseph Henrich (Harvard University) and Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia) discuss the interactions between informal norms, formal institutions, and psychology, based on examples and evidence from around the world. Wi...

With the advent of globalisation, the struggle between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ – as defined in Marxian terms – rapidly evolved from one between economic ideologies, to cultural wars. In this context, I4I Editor-in-Chief Ashok Kotwal engages in a deep-dive with Prof. Pranab Bardhan (University of California, Berkeley) on issues ranging from growing resentment towards educated elite, shifts in the fo...

In June 2021, Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee (Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, MIT) delivered the inaugural Shaibal Gupta Memorial Lecture organised by Asian Development Research Institute, broadly discussing the role of history in development economics. In June 2021, Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee (Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, MIT) delivered the ina...

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it significant challenges for the education sector. On the one hand, closing schools meant imposing a heavy cost on a whole generation of students, and on the other hand, keeping schools open was a health hazard. So how was the schooling experience in 2020, and are there any lessons for the future? To explore these crucial questions, I4I Editor-in-Ch...

कोविड-19 के प्रसार को कम करने के लिए लागू किए गए लॉकडाउन के कारण अनेक प्रवासी मजदूरों ने अपना रोज़गार गँवाया और उनमें से करीब 30 लाख से ज्‍यादा प्रवासी दूसरे राज्यों से बिहार लौट चुके हैं। इस विषय पर प्रोफेसर फरजाना अफ़रीदी के साथ बातचीत करते हुए श्री अरविंद कुमार चौधरी (आई.ए.एस.) ने बिहार लौटे मजदूरों के हित में सरकार द्वारा उठाए गए कदमों पर प्रकाश डाला है। जिसमे उन्होने मनरेगा, गरीब कल्याण रोज़ग...

In conversation with Ashok Kotwal on the ongoing economic crisis caused by lockdown to mitigate Covid-19 spread, Pronab Sen breaks down the problem into survival of individuals and livelihoods, and the survival of enterprises and the productive capacity of the economy. He contends that if enough is not done for the latter, the former will become very difficult to manage – once the pandemic begins...

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[VoxDev Talks] Lakshmi Iyer_Where are the Indian female politicians? by Ideas for India

There is a view that upsurge in inequality due to globalisation is leading to rising appeal of political platforms that promote inward-looking policies. In this podcast, I4I Editor Parikshit Ghosh (Associate Professor, Delhi School of Economics) speaks with Karl Ove Moene (Professor, Centre for the Study of Equality, Social Organization, and Performance, Department of Economics, University of Oslo...

In this podcast, I4I Editor Parikshit Ghosh (Associate Professor, Delhi School of Economics) speaks with Debraj Ray (Julius Silver Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science, and Professor of Economics, New York University) on the rise of Trump and how it relates to the upsurge of inequality in the US and the ‘American dream’ narrative; implications of the process of automation for the relative shares...