CPR Perspectives Episode 9: Rohan Venkat in conversation with Arkaja Singh

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Rahul Verma, a Fellow at CPR, where he leads the Politics Initiative. Verma is a political scientist who earned his PhD from the University of California – Berkeley, with a focus on the role of political parties, ideology and dynastic families in Indian politics. His book, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India, questions the assumption that ideology does not play an important role in the Indian voter’s decision-making. At CPR, Verma’s work with the Politics Initiative focused on building up a core body of political research, collaborating with scholars to put out reports like Dalits in the New Millennium, and studying voter behaviour through efforts like the YouGov-CPR-Mint Millennial Survey, as well as bringing his political science lens to the State Capacity Initiative. In our conversation with Verma, we spoke about his political science background, the thinking behind his research and the motivations to enter the policy world. We also spoke about the Politics Initiative and its various projects, his work with the State Capacity Initiative and Verma’s advice for young scholars entering this world.

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Mekhala Krishnamurthy, a Senior Fellow at CPR where she built the State Capacity Initiative. Krishnamurthy has spent the last 15 years engaging with questions of how the state interacts with markets and the broader economy, and what the actual lived experiences of those on the frontlines of these intersections can tell policymakers – particularly in the fields of health and agriculture. An alumna of Harvard, Cambridge and University College London, she is also Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University, and taught at Shiv Nadar University prior to that. At CPR, Krishnamurthy set up the State Capacity Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and practice programme that has carried out pioneering research studies on the Indian administrative state, and worked directly with a number of governments on questions of institutional design and capacity. In the first part of the conversation with Krishnamurthy, we spoke about what it means to be an anthropologist in the development world, how she has managed to bridge academic and policy practitioner positions, and her reading of major shifts in India’s policy discourse over the last few decades. In the second part of the conversation, we spoke about her research and writing on mandis and Indian agriculture, the idea behind the State Capacity Initiative, and her advice for younger scholars entering the policy world.

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Arkaja Singh, a Fellow at CPR, who has worked across a whole range of topics broadly converging around the idea of ‘administrative coherence. Having studied at the National Law School and SOAS, Singh spent a decade in development sector consulting and research before joining CPR. She has conducted research across a wide span of topics – from sanitation and manual scavenging to informal settlements and land titling to the framework of the Indian administrative state. The throughline across these different areas is a focus on understanding why government operates in the way it does, and what it would take to alter and reform it, not just in operations but in its international rationale. In the first part of the conversation with Singh, we spoke about her years as a ‘governance consultant’ and how that differs from her time at CPR, what she means by ‘administrative coherence’ and her research into the municipal state. In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive in a fortnight, we spoke Singh’s research on how we cannot understand about access to water without first tackling the state’s approach to land, whether there is sufficient thinking about rationalities and histories within government and what advice she has for young scholars entering the policy space.

We have a particularly special edition of CPR Perspectives – our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary. This month officially marks 50 years since the Centre was founded, back in 1973, as an institution that would work to produce field-defining research and vital policy insights relevant for both the country’s decision-makers as well as an informed public.  To mark the occasion, this edition of CPR Perspectives features a conversation with Yamini Aiyar, President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research.  As with previous episodes in the series, we touch upon Aiyar’s path to CPR – including how she entered the Indian policy ecosystem with stints at Udyogini, a grassroots NGO, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank. But the bulk of the conversation takes a broader look at the history of CPR, the vital role it has played in key Indian policy debates – from industrial policy and economic liberalisation to foreign policy and climate change – and the challenges it is currently confronting.  Aiyar joined CPR in 2008, when she founded the Accountability Initiative, a research project that oversaw one of India’s largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education and brought a deeper, evidence-based understanding of public service delivery to the policy conversation in India. In 2017, Aiyar took charge as President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, overseeing the deepening and expansion of the institution's research efforts and a broadening of its engagement with governments, grassroots organisations and the global policy community. She also continued her own research on public welfare, federalism and state capacity, while serving on a number of government and international policy committees. 

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Neelanjan Sircar, a Senior Fellow at CPR, who has brought a combination of data analysis and qualitative research to a wide range of subjects including India's political economy, urbanisation and climate change. Following degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics, Sircar received a PhD in political science from Columbia University and then carried out research at the University of Pennsylvania's Centre for the Advanced Study of India before making his way to CPR. At CPR, Sircar was instrumental in setting up the Politics Initiative, which provides high-quality research of India's political economy from a non-partisan lens, helping us build nuanced models of why voters make their choices and how political parties operate within the broader system. He is also co-editor of Colossus; The Anatomy of Delhi, a volume that seeks to unpack the complexity of India's national capital region, building on a survey of the city that could serve as a model for other sampling efforts across the country. Sircar has also led CPR's project to evaluate the welfare delivery systems of the Andhra Pradesh government. In the first part of the conversation with Sircar, we spoke about making the move from applied mathematics to the policy world, what convinced him to come work in India and why the approach that undergirds CPR's Politics Initiative is important. In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive in a fortnight, we spoke about building frameworks and tools that other researchers can replicate, why scholars can benefit from working with governments and why it is important to look beyond India when considering complex research questions.

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with D Shyam Babu, a Senior Fellow at CPR, who has over the years worked on subjects as varied as nuclear non-proliferation and national security as well as socio-economic mobility among Dalits and the societal impacts of liberalisation.  Shyam Babu was first associated with CPR in 1989, after which he spent time as a journalist and then as a fellow at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, before returning to the Centre in 2011. After working on questions of national security in his initial years in policy, Shyam Babu shifted focus to look at social change, helping conduct a number of key socio-economic surveys that examined the impacts of liberalisation on the Dalit community.  He is the co-author of Defying the Odds, a critically acclaimed book that profiled the rise of Dalit entrepreneurs, as well as co-editor of a number of other books, including The Dalit Question: Reforms and Social Justice and The India Mosaic: Searching for an Identity… More recently, Shyam Babu has been working with CPR to conduct research workshops for scholars from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities.  In the first part of the conversation with Shyam Babu, we spoke about what it was like to work across two very different policy disciplines, why he thinks an understanding of society is vital for IR scholars and the ideas that led to his research and book on Dalit entrepreneurs.  In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive in a fortnight, we spoke about the need to challenge conventional wisdom on social justice in India, why he has looked more closely at the question of ‘social cognition’ in recent years and what role think tanks like CPR have to play in making the research world more inclusive. 

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, whose work focuses on informal housing, internal migration and what these subjects can tell us about India's urban transformation. Naik is an architect and urban planner, who works with the Initiative on Cities, Economy & Society at CPR. Prior to joining CPR, she worked with a social enterprise – Micro Home Solutions – on community-based interventions aimed at improving housing in informal settlements. Naik is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture, and has a Master's Degree in urban and regional planning from Texas A&M University. In the first part of the conversation with Naik, we spoke about her pathway into the policy space, the importance of 'boundary-crossing' when tackling subjects like migration and urbanisation and her work on the Small City Dreaming project, looking at the aspirations and lives of young Indians beyond the big cities. In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive in two weeks, we spoke about how Covid changed the conversation on migrants in India, whether the learnings from that time are taking root, what it means to look at cities and urbanisation from a Global South perspective and why she advises young scholars not to over-define their career pathways.

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with KP Krishnan, an Honorary Research Professor at CPR. Krishnan spent three and a half decades in the IAS, retiring in 2019 as Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Over his years in the civil services, he served at positions in the government of Karnataka and the Union Government, as well as a stint at the World Bank, giving him a unique vantage point to observe the changes taking place in Indian economic and development policy following the 1991 liberalization. He has previously held the BoK Visiting Professorship in Regulation in the University of Pennsylvania Law School and served as the IEPF Chair Professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, in addition to stints as Visiting Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Regulation at the LBSNAA Mussorie, ISB Hyderabad and Mohali, Ashoka University and IIM Bangalore. In the first part of our conversation, I spoke to Krishnan about choosing a career in the civil services, how policy feedback operated within the IAS especially as the economy opened up and the question of being research-minded vs operational within the Indian bureaucracy. In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive later this month, we spoke about how external research was integrated into government systems, Krishnan's work at CPR looking at how well we understand Indian regulators and what advice he has for young scholars.

This month on CPR Perspectives – our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary – we bring you a conversation with Avani Kapur, a senior fellow at CPR, where she also leads the Accountability Initiative. The Accountability Initiative focuses on conducting cutting-edge research on India’s public service delivery systems and leveraging this information by ensuring it reaches government officials, academics and citizens with the aim of promoting administrative reforms at the frontlines of service delivery. Kapur has been at CPR since 2008, beginning as a Research Associate at the Accountability Initiative and working her way up to leading the research group today. Along the way, she has led process- and fund-tracking surveys on vital social sector schemes as well as anchored an annual budget brief series analysing the performance of the Indian government’s major welfare programmes – including, this year, a major lookback at the past 15 years of welfare spending and outcomes to mark AI’s 15th anniversary. In addition to leading AI, Kapur also set up the PULSE for Development platform in 2020, which brings together more than 90 organisations within the development community dedicated to citizen-centric policies and implementation. Kapur is a Tech4Good Fellow and part of the WICCI Council of Ethic, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Development Policy and Practice. In the first part of our conversation, I spoke to Kapur about starting at CPR just as the Accountability Initiative was taking shape, the stunning examples of inefficiency she discovered while looking for bottlenecks in public spending in the field and getting positive feedback from the state – including how one government official described AI’s work as being that of ‘physician’ tracking the flow of blood through the body, searching for blockages. In the second part of the conversation, which you will receive later this month, we spoke about why the initiative has moved from talking about accountability to ‘Responsive Governance’, how AI does much more grassroots capacity building work beyond its flagship PAISA public expenditure tracking, and what advice she has for young scholars entering this field. If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast here. And if you missed our previous interviews, read our conversations with Partha Mukhopadhyay (Part 1 & 2) and with Navroz Dubash (Part 1 & 2).

This month on CPR Perspectives – our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary – we bring you a conversation with Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at CPR, where he also leads the Initiative on Cities, Economy and Society. Mukhopadhyay is one of the foremost experts on urbanisation, although his expertise extends well beyond the subject. He has been at CPR since 2006, after having been on the founding team at the Infrastructure Development Finance Company, and following stints at the Export Import Bank of India and the World Bank in Washington. Over his wide-ranging career, Mukhopadhyay has introduced important concepts like ‘Subaltern Urbanisation’, referring to vibrant smaller settlements that provide a very different picture of urbanisation than the one we get from India’s mega-cities; brought careful scrutiny to India’s Special Economic Zones; studied the all-important question of informal work; and played key roles on a number of important government panels. He was chair of the Working Group on Migration, Government of India and member of the High Level Railway Restructuring Committee, Ministry of Railways and of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. Previously, he has been associated with the Committee on Allocation of Natural Resources and with the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure. In the first part of our conversation, Rohan Venkat spoke to Mukhopadhyay about choosing to work on policy in India, how being at CPR has allowed him to work across a wide range of subjects and why it is important to think about government policies as a combination of safety nets and spring boards. In the second part, which you will receive later this month, we spoke about how India could be an exemplar when it comes to urban policy, why governments ought to stay away from ‘magic bullet solutions’ and why younger scholars should always balance quantitative analysis with a more thoughtful approach to processes and outcomes. If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast.