News & Announcements

We are delighted to be hosting two scholars from the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Constantino Xavier and Pooja Ramamurthi, who will be discussing their new study on India's climate diplomacy. The details of the talk are given below.

Abstract:

As it becomes a growing economic power in an interdependent global landscape, can India finally realise its long-held ambition of being a bridging power between industrialised, high-income economies of the Global North and developing countries of the Global South? After its momentous G20 Presidency, what foreign policies can India pursue to shift its ambition from "voice" to "action" to effectively enable the green energy transition of low-and middle-income countries? Based on our ongoing research, the presentation is structured in two parts.

The first part surveys India's evolving climate persona in a fragmenting geopolitical landscape. As India adopts a more proactive role in climate policy we discuss the different tracks, beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Conference of Parties (COP), of India's climate diplomacy. Positioning itself as a climate partner between the Global North and South India's climate partnerships range across four tracks, a) Multilateral Adaptation: Working within the existing regime and institutions; b) Minilateral Innovation: Tailoring climate and geopolitical cooperation; c) Trilateral Bridging: Positioning India as a South-South-North climate hub; and d) Bilateral Issue Linkages: Connecting climate and the economy. 

The second part zooms in the third track, focusing on India and triangular climate cooperation (TrC). We discuss a) the model of TrC wherein two or more developing countries implement projects in partnership with a multilateral institution or a developed country; b) how India has made significant strides in domestic climate action through innovative local technological, policy, and financing options; c) how these domestic developmental experiences can foster exchange and transfer of the most appropriate strategies towards a low-carbon transition through shared learning within a horizontal mode of cooperation, particularly in Africa, Asia, and the Indo-Pacific region through a TrC model and d) options for India to spearhead TrC by creating a knowledge hub for countries to come together and match technological needs an implementation mechanisms required to achieve their climate goals.

Prof Rajarshi Dasgupta has joined the Editorial Board of Discover Conservation (Springer)

Prof Rajarshi Dasgupta has been selected as a Task Force Member (Scenarios and Models) of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Abstract:

Brij will focus on the system change strategy that BIRD has pursued with government, civil society, academia and media companies, spanning 28 years, including a mix of evidence-based-policymaking, advocacy, coalition-building with disability rights groups, design thinking, technology development, and legal tools. Having recently joined as Adjunct Professor at SPP, IIT-D, Brij is actively exploring cross-disciplinary collaboration with faculty and students.

Bio:

Dr. Brij Kothari is an academic and social entrepreneur. He recently joined the School of Public Policy, IIT-D as Adjunct Professor. He leads the Billion Readers (BIRD) Initiative and is the founder of PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com. Brij conceived of Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on mainstream TV in India for mass reading literacy in 1996, while pursuing his Ph.D. in Education at Cornell University. Since then, he has researched and pushed for SLS in national broadcast policy on the faculty of IIM-Ahmedabad (1996-2023). He is an Ashoka Fellow, a Schwab Social Entrepreneur, the recipient of the International Literacy Prize from the Library of Congress, USA, and Co-Impact’s system change grant for BIRD. At IIT-D he is looking for collaboration, coffee, and tennis partners.

Article can be downloaded from the below given link:

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/01/04/the-energy-transition-could-make-india-even-more-unequal

Article can be downloaded from the below given link:

https://owncloud.iitd.ac.in/nextcloud/index.php/s/At4yRNYJLdwnBEC

The School of Public Policy is offering the following new courses during the upcoming semester (January - June, 2024).

The details of these courses, please Click here.

Paper can be downloaded from the below given link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01380-y

Paper can be downloaded from the below given link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02808-x

The report can be downloaded from the below given link:

https://sdgs.un.org/gsdr/gsdr2023

Abstract:

Bio:

Abstract:

Digital platforms are essentially multi-sided markets in which the tendency to grow big is inborn due to the profound network effects. There have been passionate appeals for regulating the digital space as competition (or lack thereof) in the sector today is between large conglomerates with potentially deleterious impact on markets. Big-tech, as these conglomerates are now called, are alleged to have distorted market competition by indulging in various kinds of behaviour such as predatory acquisitions and slowing or killing innovation, data monetisation and abuse, search violations and subversion of democracy.  In February 2020, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation reported that online targeting systems have 'helped to put a handful of global online platform businesses in positions of enormous power to predict and influence behaviour'. The talk will explore firm behaviour in digital markets  and what do digital platforms mean for inclusivity in the Indian context.  It will also consider regulation of data and other laws that may be required for governance of the digital marketplace.

Brief Bio:

Rajat Kathuria is Dean of, the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Professor of Economics at Shiv Nadar University.  He carries over 20 years of experience in teaching and more than 15 years of experience in economic policy, besides pursuing extensive research on a range of issues relating to regulation and competition policy. Dr Kathuria served as Director and Chief Executive at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) before joining the University.
He has taught undergraduate Economics at the University of Maryland, USA, and spent over 12 years with the International Management Institute (IMI), New Delhi teaching post-graduate students Managerial Economics and International Trade. He has also previously worked with the World Bank in Washington D.C. as a Consultant and worked on research assignments for a number of international organizations, including the International Labour Organization (ILO), United National Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), LirneAsia, The World Bank and The Asian Development Bank (ADB). Dr. Kathuria’s work has been published in several journals of repute as well as in top magazines and newspapers across the world. He serves on multiple industry and government Committees such as the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Committee on International Trade Policy and Exports, the Implementation for Intended Determined Contribution (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India), and on the Research Advisory Council of the State Bank of India (SBI).

Abstract

Bio: 

We are delighted to host a seminar by our very own Prof. Dr. Kaveri Iychettira on Wednesday, the 6th of September 2023, at noon. See details about the talk, and the speaker bio below. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Abstract

This talk will provide an overview into Dr. Iychettira's recently published work, and into her ongoing and future efforts towards informing India's low carbon transition.
Although integrating renewable energy now forms a fundamental component of decarbonisation strategies across the world, the challenge of balancing intermittency with flexible resources remains unresolved. A strongly advocated institutional solution is to implement market mechanisms which can incentivise investment and dispatch of flexible resources to address this challenge; such mechanisms, however, only been implemented with limited success in developing countries. This work examines both the premise and prescription of the argument to integrate renewable electricity in developing countries through elements of the liberalisation model (such as a wholesale spot market, or an independent system operator for dispatch), through a detailed literature review, and case studies of India and China. Her findings suggest that cost-recovery issues and distributional imperatives need to be addressed in order to implement markets or other institutions that can enable greater integration of renewables.

She builds on this work by identifying institutional challenges associated with implementing a regional or national market based economic dispatch scheme particularly in India. She further elucidates how the interests of the states and the union government complement or conflict each other in the application of a national market-based electricity dispatch scheme. This is achieved, using documentary evidence from the consultation process employed by the regulatory authorities, interviews, and a workshop. Furthermore, she uses this rich qualitative evidence to conduct an analysis of how values and value conflicts in the policy process can hinder or encourage policy change in socio-technical systems.

She will end the talk with an overview of her ongoing and future efforts with PhD and Master students, and external collaborations; for instance — a framework for scenario design and evaluation for India's Net Zero pathways, incorporating behavioural realism in investment decisions with an ABM, modelling political economy and governance challenges in the power sector using system dynamics, and so on. This part of the talk will highlight potential methodological and theoretical contributions towards policy design for enabling a low-carbon transition in India (with possible implications for other developing countries).

Bio

Kaveri’s research is focused on the transition of energy and related sectors in the context of climate change under deep uncertainty. She approaches problems from the lenses of complex socio-technical systems, institutional analysis, systems thinking, and economics. Prior to joining IIT Delhi-SPP, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, on various aspects of India's transitioning electricity sector. She received her doctoral degree from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she investigated the design of renewable support schemes in Europe and its long-term impacts on the energy system. Apart from this, she has also worked on capacity market studies in Europe and on the deployment of solar energy in India. Dr. Kaveri Iychettira is also an Associate with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a Fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.

Abstract:

The School of Public Policy is offering two courses as Advanced Topics (3 Credits), five courses as Special Module (1 Credit), and one new course on Qualitative Methods (3 Credits) during the upcoming semester (July-December 2023).

For details on the full set of new set of courses, please click here.