Krea Politics Talk| A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey by Dr Arvind Subramanian & Dr Devesh Kapur
Krea Politics Talk| A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey by Dr Arvind Subramanian & Dr Devesh Kapur
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ABOUT THE TALK

India's journey has been distinctively 'precocious' in comparative terms. It opted for democracy before development and social change, promoted high-skilled services before and over low-skilled manufacturing, and chose a globalisation that favoured exports of talented people and short-changed the poor. The socialist state became an inefficiently capitalist one before providing the public goods of physical infrastructure and human capital. The outcomes have been surprising, with the country achieving success in creating and sustaining democracy, albeit flawed, and maintaining a modicum of order.

As the world gets radically upended, India's development odyssey is at a critical juncture. A Sixth of Humanity is an attempt to trace how one of the largest and most diverse countries in the world uniquely and daringly attempted four concurrent transformations-building a state, creating an economy, changing society and forging a sense of nationhood-under conditions of universal suffrage.

Jointly written by political scientist Devesh Kapur and economist Arvind Subramanian, both of whom have decades of academic and policy experience, this book encompasses perspectives that span disciplines, experiences and geographies. Rigorously researched, carefully argued and lucidly written, this is the definitive development history of India. There is no book remotely like it.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Arvind Subramanian

Arvind Subramanian is senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). Previously, he has taught at Brown, Ashoka and Harvard Universities. He served as the chief economic advisor to the government of India between 2014 and 2018. He currently also advises state governments in India on macro-economic, fiscal and sectoral issues. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world's top 100 global thinkers in 2011. His latest book (co-authored with Devesh Kapur), A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, was a Financial Times book of the year.

As chief economic adviser, his annual Economic Survey of India, became a widely read document on Indian economic policy and development. The 2018 Survey had 20 million views from over 190 countries in its first year of publication. He was closely involved in the design of the nation-wide Goods and Services Tax (GST) and several other policy initiatives. His reflections on his tenure were published as Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Jaitley-Modi Economy. His critically acclaimed book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China's Economic Dominance sold over 130,000 copies and was translated into 4 languages.

Dr Devesh Kapur 

Dr Devesh Kapur has a distinguished background in research and academia. He joined the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in July 2018 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, holding the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to his tenure at Penn, he was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. Dr Kapur received the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize, awarded to the best junior faculty at Harvard College and Outstanding Teaching in Political Science by the American Political Science Association, in 2005.

He is the author/co-author of A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey (Oxford University Press, 2026 and Financial Times Best Books in Economics, 2025); The Other One Percent: Indians in America (Oxford University Press, 2017 and Choice Outstanding Title 2017); Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (Random House, 2014); Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India (Princeton University Press, 2010, best book Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of ISA); Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World (Center for Global Development and Brookings Institution, 2005); The World Bank: Its First Half Century (The Brookings Institution, 1997). He has also edited/co-edited eight volumes, most recently Internal Security in India: Violence, Order and the State (Oxford University Press, 2023); The Oxford Handbook of Higher Education in the Asia-Pacific Region (2023); and Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance (Hart, 2019).
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