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Recent IiT Features

  • Public Interest Litigation in India: Time for an Audit

    Public Interest Litigation (PIL), which aims to use the courts to advance social justice, began in India about thirty years ago when procedures for expanding access to justice were developed. The judiciary, aiming to recapture popular support after its complicity in Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency rule, encouraged litigation concerning the interests of the poor and marginalized.

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  • India’s MMRCA Deal: Muddled Rationale, Costly Adventure?

    Although nowhere near as high profile or politically dramatic as the 2008 Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, India’s proposed $10 billion procurement of 126 medium multirole combat aircraft (MRCA) may have a much more profound impact on India’s strategic relations, particularly if a U.S. Platform – either Lockheed’s F-16 E/F or Boeing’s F/A-18 E/F – is selected as the winning bid.

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  • No Good Choices for the Indian Air Force
    In the Medium-range Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) sweepstakes, the Indian Air Force (IAF) is confronted with many choices, all of them bad. Whatever the IAF’s reasons for wanting a new aircraft, the Indian government means to use the deal to make international political capital, gain leverage in bilateral relations, and cement a strategic partnership.
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About IiT
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Devesh Kapur

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Director

Devesh Kapur was appointed Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India in 2006. He is Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn, and holds the Madan Lal Sobti Professorship for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India. His new book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2010. He is the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize awarded to the best junior faculty, Harvard College, in 2005.

Professor Kapur holds a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University; an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota; and a Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Selected Publications

Books

Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World (with John McHale). Center for Global Development, 2006. [HTML]

Public Institutions in India:Performance and Design (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta). Oxford University Press, 2005. [HTML]

The World Bank: Its First Half Century (with John P. Lewis and Richard Webb). Brookings Institution Press, 1997. 2 vols. [HTML]


Articles

"Public Opinion and Indian Foreign Policy," Devesh Kapur. India Review, Volume 8, Number 3. July-September 2009. pp. 286-305 [PDF]

Devesh Kapur, Radhika Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "Climate Change: India's Options," Economic & Political Weekly, August 1, 2009. [PDF]

Mihir A. Desai, Devesh Kapur, John McHale, Keith Rogers. "The Fiscal Impact of High Skilled Emigration: Flows of Indians to the U.S." Journal of Development Economics, 88(1): 32-44, 2009 [PDF] 

Ajay Agrawal, Devesh Kapur and John McHale, "How Do Spatial and Social Proximity Influence Knowledge Flows? Evidence from Patent Data," Journal of Urban Economics, 64: 258-269, 2008. [PDF]

Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “Mortgaging the Future? Indian Higher Education,” Brookings-NCAER India Policy Forum 2007-08, Volume 4, 2008, p. 101-157. [PDF]

Devesh Kapur, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Arvind Subramanian, "More on Direct Cash Transfers," Economic & Political Weekly, November 22, 2008. [PDF]

Devesh Kapur and Richard Webb. 2007. "Beyond the IMF," UNCTAD, G-24 Discussion Paper No. 43, February. [PDF]

Yoshiko M. Herrera and Devesh Kapur. 2007. "Improving Data Quality: Actors, Incentives, and Capabilities," /Political Analysis/, 15:365–386 [PDF]

"The Indian Parliament as an Institution of Account ability" (with Pratap Mehta). Paper no. 23, Democracy, Governance and Human Rights series. (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2006). [PDF]

The IMF and Democracy (with Moises Naim), Journal of Democracy (January 2005). [PDF]

"The Causes and Consequences of India's IT Boom," India Review vol. 1, no. 2 (April 2002). [PDF]

"The Common Pool Dilemma of Global Public Goods: Lessons from the World Bank's Net Income and Reserves," World Development vol. 30, no. 3 (March 2002). [PDF]

"Diasporas and Technology Transfer," Journal of Human Development vol. 2, no. 2 (July 2001). [PDF]

"Expansive Agendas and Weak Instruments: Governance Related Conditionalities of International Financial Institutions," Journal of Policy Reform vol. 4, no. 3. (2001). [PDF]


Book Chapters

"Privatization in India: The Imperatives and Consequences of Gradualism" (with Ravi Ramamurti), in Srinivasan (ed.), India After a Decade of Economic Reforms: Retrospect and Prospects. Stanford Univeristy Press, forthcoming. [PDF]

The Knowledge Bank in Birdsall (ed.), The Future of the World Bank. Center for Global Development, forthcoming. [PDF]

Outsourcing and International Labor Mobility: A Political Economy Analysis”(with Sanjay Jain and Sharun Mukund), in Foders and Langhammer (eds.), Labor Mobility and the World Economy. Springer Publishers, 2006. [PDF]

Sojourns and Software: Internationally Mobile Human Capital and High-Tech Industry Development in India, Ireland and Israel” (with John McHale), in Arora and Gambardella (eds.), From Underdogs to Tigers: The Rise and Growth of the Software Industry in Some Emerging Economies. Oxford University Press, 2005. [PDF]


Working Papers


"Brain Drain or Brain Bank? The Impact of Skilled Emigration on Poor-Country Innovation," Ajay Agrawal, Devesh Kapur, John McHale, NBER Working Paper Series, December 2008 [PDF] 

"Beyond the ABCs: Higher Education and Developing Countries", Devesh Kapur and Megan Crowley, February 2008, Center for Global Development [PDF]

"Remittances: The New Development Mantra?" G-24 Discussion Paper Series no. 29 (New York and Geneva, UN Conference on Trade and Development, 2004). [PDF]

"Indian Higher Education Reform: From Half-Baked Socialism to Half-Baked Capitalism" (with Pratap Mehta). CID Working Paper No. 108. (Cambridge: Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2004). [PDF]

"Sharing the Spoils: Taxing International Human Capital Flows" (with Mihir A. Desai and John McHale). Paper no. 02-06 (Cambridge: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, 2002). [PDF]


Essays & Reviews

"Academics Have More to Declare Than Their Genius," Devesh Kapur. Financial Times, June 23, 2009 [Full Article]

“The Specter Haunting India,” Devesh Kapur. India in Transition, December 15, 2008 [Full Article] 

“Are the Indian armed forces facing a human capital crisis?” Devesh Kapur, Op-Ed in The Indian Express newspaper, March 27, 2008 [PDF]

"Developing Countries Worse Off Than Once Thought – Part II", Devesh Kapur, February 13, 2008, YaleGlobal [PDF]

"India's Poor: From Raw Deal to New Deal," by Devesh Kapur, Partha Mukhopadhyay and Arvind Subramanian, Op-Ed in Business Standard newspaper January 15, 2008 [PDF]

"Between a love fest and a bureaucratic wall," Devesh Kapur, January 11, 2008, India in Transition. [Full Article]

"India-US relations. What does the Indian public think?," Devesh Kapur, India in Transition, November 5, 2007. [Full Article]

"Primary Concerns" (with Sunil Khilnani). Hindustan Times, April 23, 2006. [PDF]

"India's Promise?" Harvard Magazine (July-August 2005). [PDF]

"The Indian diaspora as a strategic asset", Economic and Political Weekly (February 1-7, 2003). [PDF]

"Migration's New Payoff, Foreign Policy, (November/December, 2003). [PDF]

"Firm Opinions, Infirm Facts," Seminar India no. 538. [PDF]

"Who Gets to Run the World?" Foreign Policy (Nov-Dec 2000). [PDF]

"The IMF: A Cure or A Curse?" Foreign Policy (Summer 1998). [PDF]


Affiliations & Memberships

Center for Global Development, nonresident fellow
The Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford, senior associate
Brookings - NCAER India Panel
Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), board of directors