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This episode is the sixth and final installment of a series in which Shruti speaks with doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars about their research as they enter the job market and the world of academia. The first episode featured Vaishnavi Surendra, the second episode featured Rohit Ticku, the third episode featured Tanu Kumar, the fourth episode featured Proma Ray Chaudhury, and the fifth episode featured Vaidehi Tandel. In this episode, Shruti talks with Kunal Mangal about his research on the pursuit of government jobs in India and why the competition for these jobs is so fierce. Mangal is a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at Harvard University. His research focuses on labor markets in developing countries, and he is currently studying India’s competitive exam system for government jobs. For Kunal’s research and for a full transcript of this conversation, visit https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

The fifth scholar in our young scholars series, Dr. Vaidehi Tandel. She is an economist specializing in urban political economy and policy in India. I spoke with Vaidehi about her work on urban economics in India, in particular, her paper on “What’s in a definition? A study on the suitability of the current urban definition in India through its employment guarantee programme. (with Komal Hiranandani and Mudit Kapoor) and her paper titled paper, “Too slow for the urban march: Litigations and real estate in Mumbai, (with Sahil Gandhi, Alexander Tabarrok and Shamika Ravi) and her joint work on using a system of Adaptive Controls in the battle against Covid. For Proma’s papers and for a full transcript of this conversation, visit https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

The fourth scholar in our young scholars series is Proma Ray Chaudhury, a PhD Candidate at the School of Law and Government in Dublin City University under the EU Marie Curie ETN Global India Project, working on gender and women’s political participation in contemporary India. I spoke with Proma about her paper titled, “The Political Asceticism of Mamata  Banerjee: Female Populist Leadership in Contemporary India,” where she studies representation of female political leaders, in particular, Mamata Bannerjee in West Bengal. For Proma’s papers and for a full transcript of this conversation, visit https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

For the next few weeks I will be speaking to young doctoral and post-doctoral candidates entering the academic job market and the policy world about their newly minted research on Indian political economy. The third scholar in our young scholars series, Dr. Tanu Kumar is a postdoctoral fellow at William and Mary’s Global Research Institute. She is a political scientist studying urban politics and service delivery. I spoke with Tanu about her paper, “Home-Price Subsidies Increase Local-Level Political Participation in Urban India,” which has been conditionally accepted at the Journal of Politics. In her paper, Tanu studies the effects of a housing subsidy program in Mumbai through an original survey of winners and nonwinners of program lotteries, and its effect on local political participation. We also discussed another one of Tanu’s papers, “The Human Capital Effects of Subsidized Government-Constructed Homes in Urban India,” on how this housing subsidy affects long-term investments in human capital. Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links: https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

For the next few weeks I will be speaking to young doctoral and post-doctoral candidates entering the academic job market and the policy world about their newly minted research on Indian political economy. The next scholar in our young scholar series is of Dr. Rohit Ticku. Rohit is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Society at Chapman University. He is working on religion, culture and identity from an economic point of view. I spoke with Rohit about his paper, titled Economic Shocks and Temple Desecrations in Medieval India, which is coauthored with Anand Shrivastava and Sriya Iyer, where they show that economic downturns led rules to strategically desecrate temples to quell mass uprisings. I also discussed another one of Rohit’s papers titled Same Sex Marriage Laws and Coming out in America:Theory and Evidence from Catholic Priesthood (coauthored with Avner Seror) on the effect of the same-sex marriage laws on the expression of sexual identity in the United States. Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links: https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

For the next few weeks, I will be speaking to young doctoral and post-doctoral candidates entering the academic and policy works about their newly minted research on Indian political economy. The first scholar in our young scholars’ series is Dr. Vaishnavi Surendra. Vaishnavi is a post-doctoral scholar at University of California, Berkley. She is a development economist working in the area of household finance and her research is focused on studying credit markets in rural India.  Today I’ll be speaking with her on her findings on moneylenders in rural India. In her paper titled, “The Moneylender as Middleman: Formal Credit Supply and Informal Loans in Rural India” Vaishnavi demonstrates that informal moneylenders borrow from the formal banking system and lend to households acting as intermediaries to ease lending capital constraints in rural India.  Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links: https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

Shruti talks with Adam Auerbach about competition, creative problem-solving, and formalizing political activity in India’s urban slums. In this episode, Shruti spoke with Adam Auerbach about his 2019 book, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums. Auerbach is an assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University. His research interests include local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus in South Asia and particularly in India. Shruti also talked with Adam about the ethnic and social diversity of Indian slums, the lack of geographic mobility between those neighborhoods, political representation at the extremely local level, and much more. Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

Today’s guest is Rohit De, who is an associate professor of history at Yale University. His recent book, A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, is an excellent look at how the constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. Rohit details how those on the margins of society, like butchers and prostitutes, or drinkers and traders, made claims using the constitution after India’s founding and shaped India’s constitutional culture. I had a chance to speak with Rohit about the four cases he makes in the book. We talked about how individuals asserted their rights against an oppressive, regulatory, and socialist state that had criminalized their daily activities and infringed on their ability to carry on their profession. We also had a chance to talk about Indian constitutionalism, economic planning and controls during the Nehruvian socialism, the meaning of constitutional franchise, constitutional symbolism during the citizenship amendment protests in India, Rohit’s intellectual journey, and much more. Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

Today my guest is Vijayendra Rao, or as he's known, Biju Rao, a lead economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. His recent book coauthored with professor Paromita Sanyal called Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies, is an excellent study of citizens voice in India's Gram Sabhas, or village assemblies, which are also the largest deliberative institution in human history.  I had a chance to speak with Biju about deliberative democracy in India, federalism and local governments, conducting ethnographic research, what it means to be a development economist, the relevance of methodology and history, and much more.  Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan Connect with Biju on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bijurao

Today’s guest is Viral Acharya, who is the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His recent book, Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India is an excellent introduction to the problems of autonomous central banking in the face of fiscal dominance by the ever-expanding Indian state. The book contains a series of Viral’s lectures given during his tenure as Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India. This conversations covers his views on fiscal dominance and its impact on central banking, the current banking crisis brewing in India, India’s informal economy, problems with fiscal federalism, the role of technocrats and the role of ideology, and the reversal of policy direction towards more statism.    Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

My guest today is Sriya Iyer, a Bibby Fellow and College Lecturer at St Catharine's College and Affiliated Lecturer and Janeway Fellow at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.  Her recent book, The Economics of Religion in India is an excellent survey of her work on religion in India, from the economic point of view, studied using the tools of economics.  In this book Sriya analyzes provisioning of religious and non-religious services by religious organizations in India, ethnic conflict, riots, competition between religious organization, and religious education. This work is extremely insightful and sheds light to understand more recent trends of nationalism in India.   In this episode we cover her work on the economics of religion, caste, the rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism, her intellectual influences, and much more.  Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/tag/ideas-of-india-podcast/ Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

Anuj is a professor at the Jindal Global Law School. And his recent book, Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India is an excellent account of the development and failure of the Public Interest Litigation movement. In this book Anuj details the big PIL cases in the last few decades – concerning pollution of the Taj Mahal, pollution of river Ganges, as well as cases dealing with vehicular pollution, deindustrialization and slum demolitions in Delhi. His analysis brings out two implications of the PIL movement on India – one on Indian citizens, especially the poor, because of arbitrary and draconian orders of the court. And the toll the PIL movement has taken on the Indian judiciary and its reputation. I had a chance to speak with Anuj about the relaxation of locus standi requirements and procedural constraints on the judiciary in India since the 1980s; about the current state of Supreme Court, ruled more by whim than by law, the work of a legal anthropologist, his intellectual influences, and much more.  This conversation was recorded before the Prashant Bhushan contempt of court case. But Anuj’s ideas and research also help explain these recent trends in the Indian judiciary. Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/tags/ideasofindia Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan

Dinyar Patel an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research and a research affiliate at the Mittal Institute at Harvard University.  His latest book, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, is an excellent biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, a foundational figure in the building of modern-day India. I had a chance to speak with Dinyar about the trajectory of Indian nationalism, the ideas that influenced Naoroji, the difference between Naoroji and his contemporaries like fellow parsi and British MP Mancherjee Bhownagree, Naoroji’s correspondence with radical socialist Henry Hyndman, Dinyar’s intellectual and professional journey, and much more. Full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links:  https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/tags/ideasofindia Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan  

Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic thinking that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan. Today, my guest is Madhav Khosla, associate professor of political science at Ashoka University and the Ambedkar Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia Law School. His latest book, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy, details the main ideas or traditions of thought that informed the Indian constitutional project and discusses how the framing of the Constitution changed India’s trajectory. In his book, Madhav talks about the decision of the framers to have a very long and codified Constitution as a pedagogical project. He argues that the framers centralized power to fight localism and parochialism. And we spoke about the framers’ idea of representation in a society fragmented by religion and caste, with the backdrop of Partition, and the relevance of those choices today. I had a chance to talk about these themes, the link between India’s founding and its constitutional troubles today, the framers of the Constitution, Madhav’s intellectual influences, and much more. This conversation was recorded in person in February, before the COVID pandemic. But Madhav’s book on the founding is unlikely to lose its relevance anytime soon. Transcript: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/08202020/ideas-india-constitutional-democracy If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your friends and colleagues! 

Welcome to Ideas Of India, where we examine the academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and I’m an economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. My guest today is Ajay Shah, professor of economics at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi. Over the years I’ve learned a lot from Ajay’s academic and policy-oriented research on India, which is written at the intersection of economics, law, and public administration.  His latest book, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy, co-authored with Prof. Vijay Kelkar, is an excellent overview of their interdisciplinary approach to policy in India. An important theme in the book is that market failure in itself does not justify state intervention. And between market failure and government intervention we must examine state capacity, the incentives of political actors, and the checks and balances provided by the larger institutional framework. While Ajay used to be more focused on technical aspects of economics and about where markets can fail, now his focus is on working through the rules and institutional arrangements through which we govern ourselves. In addition to the ideas in the book, Ajay and I talk about this evolution in his thinking, his first-hand experience with policy making, his journey as an economist, major influences, and much more. Transcript: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/08062020/ideas-india-libertarianism-necessity/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ideasofindia If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your friends and colleagues!

Welcome to Ideas Of India, where we examine the academic ideas that will propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and I’m an economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Here is a an excerpt from our first episode, featuring Ajay Shah. The first full episode will premiere on August 6, 2020.