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 You Care About Public Policy, and the graphic nonfiction narrative We, the Citizens. He has co-edited India’s Marathon: Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order. Today we are discussing his most recent book, W ..read more

Today my guests are M. Krishnan and Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan. M. Krishnan is an economist based in Chennai and Singapore, and specializes in agriculture education systems, fisheries, and aquaculture research. He is currently an advisor at Infinite-Sum Modeling Inc and was a distinguished scientist of the Agricultural Research Service of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan is an economist specializing in trade and international policy. He is a Fellow at the (NITI) Aayog, Government of India, where he formerly led the institution’s sections on Trade ..read more

Aparna Chandra is a constitutional scholar and associate professor of law at the National Law school in Bangalore. She is the coauthor, along with Sital Kalantry and William Hubbard of the recent book Court on Trial: A Data-Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India. We spoke about the problem of pendency across all courts in the Indian judiciary, whether the Supreme Court is truly a people’s court, the problem of special leave petitions, potential ways to reform the judiciary, and much more.  Recorded February 16th, 2024. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Timesta ..read more

This is our 100th episode and I want to thank our listeners, the guests who have been exceptionally generous with their time and insights, the fantastic team at Mercatus that helps me produce and disseminate the podcast, and to all our donors and supporters. Today my guest is Douglas Irwin, who is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of dozens of books and papers, most recently, Clashing over Commerce, which is a magisterial history of US trade policy. We spoke about India’s liberalization moment in 1991, the five phases of globalization, British r ..read more

Aditya Balasubramanian is a Senior Lecturer in History at Australian National University. His research focuses on various aspects of the history of modern South Asia. And he is the author of the new book, Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India. We spoke about the history of a conservative and ideological opposition politics of India, influence of BR Shenoy and more generally the Austrian economists on Swatratra party, about C Rajagopalachari, other members, and much more. Recorded December 22nd, 2023. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful ..read more

Today my guest is Nasreen Munni Kabir, a documentary filmmaker, TV producer and director, author, biographer, translator/subtitler, and an absolute authority on all things Hindi cinema. We spoke about her biographical conversation series of books with artists like Javed Akhtar, Gulzar, Lata Mangeshkar, Waheeda Rahman, Zakir Hussain, AR Rahman. We also spoke about her documentary films on Guru Dutt, and television series Movie Mahal chronicling the history of Hindi cinema, how she chooses her subjects, the difficulty of subtitling Hindi films, her favorite films, songs, artists, and much m ..read more

Today the roles are reversed. In the 2023 end of the year review episode, producer Dallas Floer asks Shruti questions from our listeners about Shruti's ideas of India, how Shruti prepares for the podcast, various guests, the most listened to and the most underrated episode picks of the year, and much more.  Recorded December 12th, 2023. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Follow us on X Follow Shruti on X Follow Dallas on X Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox ..read more

Our last scholar in the series this year is Rajat Kocchar, a post-doctoral scholar at University of Chicago’s Energy and Environment Lab. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California, and his research lies in the field of environmental economics, in particular, on the understanding the factors that incentivize adaptation to climate shocks. We discussed his paper, “Does Market Power in Local Agricultural Markets Hinder Farmer Climate Change Adaptation?” We talked about the impact of distortionary policies and regulations on farmer’s ability to cope with weather shocks ..read more

Shruti spoke with Vani Swarupa Murali a PhD. Candidate and an instructor at the South Asian Studies Department in the National University of Singapore (NUS). She has a Masters in Asian Studies from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore. Her research lies at the intersection of political science and agricultural policy and environmental governance. We spoke about “When Sowing is not Reaping: Decentralisation, Groundwater Extraction and Agrarian Livelihoods in Tamil Nadu.” We talked about the overly centralized administrative, political, and fiscal Indian state, its i ..read more

Shruti spoke with Kartikeya Batra, who is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Maryland and has a master’s in international affairs from The Fletcher School. His research lies at the intersection of political economy, development economics, and economic history. They discussed his job market paper titled “Long-Run Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from India,” and talked about the erstwhile Zamindari or Taluqdari system and its impact on modern day Uttar Pradesh, land titling versus land redistribution in India, the importance of property rights, relationship be ..read more