Events

About the Program

Ever wondered why India remains poor, with the top 1% bagging more than 70% of the country's wealth? Why our political system not only falls short of the textbook ideal, but prioritizes communal politics, corruption, and cronyism?

The "Politics of Development" is a two-day immersive residential course curated for a batch of 120 Policy Enthusiasts looking for the answers to these and many other grueling questions and striving to find solutions for the same. Our esteemed keynote speaker, Mr. Swaminathan Aiyar will take up discussions on Post-Reform Realities. Further discussions about the nuances of good governance and a deeper look into the crux of political corruption in India that are part of program will be brought up as well.

PoD follows our philosophy for integrated learning and interactive discussions by including lectures by domain specialists, policymakers and policy enthusiasts, and supplementing them with games, movies and presentations to promote healthy group discussions.

Program Highlights:

• Keynote speakers from industry leaders and policy domain influencers
• 2-day intensive residential course more than 100 policy enthusiasts to network with
• Engaging in interactive and thought provoking exercises with the brightest minds of the industry

Selection Process: Since the seats are limited and the candidates will be selected on a rolling basis, those who apply earlier will have a higher chance of selection.

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Schedule

DAY 0 | 01 February 2019

• 18:00 - 22:00 | Registration, Speed Networking and Introduction to the course

DAY 1 | 02 February 2019 | Politics of Poverty

• 09:00 - 10:30 | Open hours with Mentors: Discussion on Pre-work
• 10:30 - 11:00 | Break
• 11:00 - 11:30 | Activity
• 11:30 - 13:00 | Is there Really a Culture of Poverty in India?
  
  This session explores how poverty is not a result of people being tardy or unambitious but rather the result of bad policies which attack their economic freedom and property rights.
• 13:00 - 14:30 | Lunch
• 14:30 - 16:00 | Once Upon a Time in 1991
  
  This session delves into India's experience with socialism and how it created a rent-seeking society with rampant corruption. As consumers, citizens werdenied goods. As producers, entrepreneurs were denied the ability to produce.
• 16:00 - 16:30 | Break
• 16:30 - 19:00 | To Regulate or Not to Regulate
  
  This session discusses how liberalisation opened the economy and lifted millions out of poverty, but did not go far enough. Many quarters were left untouched and continue to suffer under the old system of state permits. At the same time, cronyism thrives in the state-controlled sectors of the economy and bad regulations continue to thwart our development.
• 19:00 - 20:30 | Dinner
• 20:30 - 22:00 | Political corruption: Authority plus Monopoly minus Transparency
  
  This session explores why political parties often recruit candidates with criminal backgrounds and citizens vote for 'strongmen' politicians who are looked up to as Robin Hood figures.
• 22:00 - 22:30 | Open Hour with Mentors

DAY 2 | 03 February 2019 | Politics of Prosperity

• 09:00 - 09:40 | Activity
• 09:40 - 11:30 | How Can We Disrupt the Political Marketplace?
  
  This sessions advances increasing political competition through federalism and bringing in campaign finance reform as two possible solutions to increase governmental accountability.
• 11:30 - 12:00 | Break
• 12:00 - 13:15 | Keynote Dialogue with Swaminathan Aiyar
• 13:15 - 14:15 | Lunch
• 14:15 - 15:30 | Lifting Barriers for Ease of Earning a Living
  
  This session debunks how India's big government is hardly a check on big business. Instead, rampant state regulation reduces competition and increases costs of compliance for entrepreneurs making it harder for them to earn a living.
• 15:30 - 16:00 | Open Hour with Mentors
• 16:00 - 17:30 | How good a solution is welfare?
  
  This session argues that given the widespread poverty and rising inequality, redistribution of wealth and government welfare schemes may seem to be the obvious short-term solutions. But limiting attention only to these policies is likely to undermine the very process that has lifted millions out of poverty
• 17:30 - 18:00 | Activity
• 18:00 - 18:30 | Wrap-Up and Graduation

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Speakers

Swaminathan Aiyar (Keynote Speaker)

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is an Indian journalist and columnist. He is a consulting editor for the Economic Times and was formerly Editor of two of India's biggest economic dailies, Financial Express from 1988-90 and The Economic Times from 1992-94. He is also a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and the elder brother of Mani Shankar Aiyar, who is a senior Congress leader.

Ajay Shah

Ajay is currently Professor at the National Institute for Public Finance and Policy in Delhi. He is a former consultant to the Department of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Finance and former Associate Professor, IGIDR. He was listed among the Top 10 economists in the Indian Express supplement 'The Most Powerful Indians in 2010'.

Mohit Satyanand

Mohit Satyanand is an entrepreneur, consultant, investor, and policy wonk. After an M.A. from Delhi School of Economics, he joined Hindustan Lever as a management trainee, moving 4 years later to Delhi Flour Mills, where he established India's first successful snack food brand, Crax. In 1989, he co-founded Teamwork Films, which now produces several of India's most prestigious arts festivals, including the Jaipur Literary Festival, and annual festivals in Singapore, South Africa, Europe, and North America.

Barun Mitra

Barun is the founder and director of the Liberty Institute, www.InDefenceofLiberty.org, a nonprofit, independent public policy research and advocacy organization, based in New Delhi, India. Liberty Institute is dedicated to enhancing individual freedom in economic and political domains. Among the recognition the Institute has received was the Templeton Award for social entrepreneurship in 2003. Barun Mitra also received the 2005 Julian L. Simon Award for his contribution in environmental policy debates from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Jayaprakash Narayan

Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan is a physician by training who went into the Indian Administrative Service in the aftermath of the Emergency and failure of the Janata Experiment. He was a topper in the IAS exam. During the 16 years of distinguished public service in various capacities, he acquired a formidable reputation in the erstwhile State of Andhra Pradesh. His experience in government convinced him that faulty governance process was the biggest hurdle to India and Indians achieving greater success. And what India needs today is a fundamental change in the rules of the game and not a periodic change of players. In order to translate his vision into practical reality, he resigned from Service (IAS) in 1996 and worked with like-minded colleagues for the formation of Lok Satta. Lok Satta has now emerged as India's leading civil society initiative for governance reforms.

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Join the Two Day Residential Course in Public Policy

Application deadline: 27^th January 2019

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Fee includes food, accommodation, transport from Huda City Centre to the venue on first and last day, and learning material.

Lex policy is a certificate course in law and public policy. The course will explore the various ways in which the constitution remains the fundamental determinant of government policy, and what implications it has had on India's policy success and failures.

About the Program

The Republic Day marks the day when the Constitution came into effect. Today, the Constitution is often used as an instrument for progressive change, or seen as an aspirational document of what the State should be. While it is both of them in limited capacities, it's fundamental role is to pose a set of constraints--to establish separation of powers, a system of checks and balances and to constrain the scope of legislation, among other things.

The document has been remarkable in ensuring peaceful transitions of power, protection of linguistic minorities, women's and dalits' rights and in constraining majoritarianism. At the same time, government policy has shaped its interpretation in such a way that it has failed to effectively constrain the State from intervening in citizens' lives. The Indian state's long conflict with individual liberties is manifest in constitutional cases like Champakam Dorairajan (1951), Golaknath (1967), Kesavananda Bharati(1973) and Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) (2017). The Directive Principles of State Policy and Fundamental Rights raise some fundamental contradictions inherent in the Constitution.

These issues are not of mere academic interest. On the contrary, government intervention continues to weigh heavy on India's growth story. There are a 'million mutinies' across the country, on issues such as land rights, reservation in education and jobs, the unemployment crisis, religious freedom and others whose roots lie in an unrestrained state which acted as an arbiter of privilege for one section over the other.

On this Republic Day, join us as we attempt to understand the role of the constitution in India's history and the future that lies ahead. Seats are limited.

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Speakers

Sanjiv Agarwal

Sanjiv Agarwal is an entrepreneur and inventor with patents issued in several countries. He authored 'The Indian Federalist - The Original Will of India's Founding Fathers'. In the past, He has challenged the 42nd and the 44th amendments, in the Supreme Court of India. These amendments inserted 'Socialist' in the preamble and removed the Right to Property from the fundamental rights, in the Indian Constitution. He is the founder of Good Governance India Foundation. He is inspired by Benjamin Franklin who famously said - 'If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.'

Prashant Narang

An advocate who believes in free enterprise. Having taught at some of the best law schools across India as a visiting faculty, he is currently pursuing PhD from Center for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University and running a YouTube channel on policy issues.

Bhuvana Anand

Bhuvana Anand is a governance and public policy specialist. Her experience spans working with donors and civil society organisations in Sudan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, India and the United States, in policy advocacy, managing multi-pronged programs and research. She has university and graduate level training in economics and politics, including coursework in political economy, public policy and principles of law. Bhuvana is deeply interested in institutional economics and public choice theories that help to explain the 'interest-incentive-information' motivation that guides and governs political leaders and civil servants. She received a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and her bachelor's from St Xavier's College, Mumbai. She previously worked with the United Nations, the British Government's Department for International Development, and MIT's Poverty Action Lab. Bhuvana is currently a research advisor with CCS and was Principal Investigator for the volume Doing Business in Delhi.

Namita Wahi

Namita Wahi is a fellow at CPR, where she leads the Land Rights Initiative. Namita holds an SJD (doctoral) degree from Harvard Law School, where she wrote her dissertation on "The Right to Property and Economic Development in India". Namita's doctoral dissertation traces the historical evolution of the right to property in the Indian Constitution from the colonial period until 1967.

Namita's research interests are broadly in the areas of property rights, social and economic rights, and eminent domain or expropriation law. She has written extensively on these issues in various academic journals and edited volumes, as well as newspapers and magazines. Namita has taught courses in these areas at Harvard University, both at the Law School and the Department of Government, and at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.

Before entering academia, Namita was a litigator with Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York, where she practised primarily in the areas of bankruptcy, securities, criminal defence and asylum law. Namita also holds an LLM from Harvard Law School, where she was awarded the Laylin Prize for the "Best Paper in International Law" and BA and LLB(Hons.) degrees from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, where she received several gold medals for her academic achievements.

Harsh Gupta

Harsh Gupta is a Delhi-based investment professional. He has a degree in economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from INSEAD. He is also a CFA charterholder and an IIT Delhi dropout. He has written on economics and politics for Mint, Swarajya, Pragati, Wall Street Journal, Indian Express and other publications. Harsh has co-authored a book on financial derivatives published by Cambridge University Press. He earlier worked for MIT Poverty Action Lab in India and Bain in the US and UK.

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On this Republic Day, join us as we attempt to understand the role of the constitution in India's history and the future that lies ahead. Seats are limited.

Program Date: 26-27 January 2019
Application deadline: 24 January 2019
Venue: YWCA International Guest House, 10, Sansad Marg, Connaught Place
Course Fee: INR 2000

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