Ideas of India

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...

Our fourth scholar in the series is  Asad Tariq , who is a doctoral candidate in Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.  His research focuses on the political economy of development, with a particular interest in religion, politics and public service delivery in India. We spoke about his job market paper titled, Constituencies of Change: Electoral Redistricting and Public Good...

Our third scholar in the series is  Chetana Sabnis , who is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on how states regulate intimate relationships and construct hierarchies of familial belonging. We spoke about her job market paper titled,  The Intimacy Contract in Action: How Indian Courts Determine which Extramarital Relationships Deser...

Our second scholar in the series is  Sunny Rai , who is a  postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph. D. in Computer Engineering from University of Delhi. Her research focuses on misinformation, mental health and cross-cultural variations in human language. We spoke about her co-authored job market paper titled, Social...

Our first scholar in the series is  Kartik Srivastava , who is a PhD candidate at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Before this, he received his bachelor's degree from Yale University, where he majored in Economics and Engineering Sciences.  His research focuses on development economics, labor economics, and political economy. We spoke about his job market paper titled, Familiar strangers:...

Today my guest is Narayani Basu, who is a historian and the author of the latest book,  A Man for All Seasons: The Life of K. M. Panikkar . Her last book was a biography of  V.P. Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India .  We talked about KM Panikkar, his comparison with VP Menon, the Indian nationalist movement in the interwar years, the origins of India's diplomatic relationship with China, P...

Today my guest is  Yamini Aiyar , who is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and the author of the recent book  Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools .   Her main research interests are contemporary politics, state capacity, welfare policy, and federalism. We talked about the challenges of education policy and welfare in...

Today my guest is Rathin Roy , who's a Distinguished Fellow at the Kautilya School of Public Policy and a Visiting Senior Fellow at ODI Global. His main research interests are political economy, public finance, and development economics, and he also served on the 13th Finance Commission. We talked about India's fiscal resources are distributed across states and between the union and state governme...