Assessing the Status of India's Muslims: An Insider's View of the Sachar Committee Report

CASI Seminar
Rakesh Basant
Professor of Economics, IIM, Ahmedabad
Center for the Advanced Study of India 3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor) University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104

Dr. Basant served as the chief economist of the Prime Minister's Committee on the Social, Economic, and Educational Status of the Muslim Community in India (Sachar Committee.) In his remarks at CASI, he will share a unique perspective on the many factors that went into the Report's production. For anyone interested in seeing the document, you can download a PDF version of the file from the website of the National Council of Applied Economic Research: http://www.ncaer.org/whatsnew.html#N4

Dr. Basant is currently a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. His teaching and research interests focus on public policy and regulation. His recent work has looked at competition policy, inter-firm linkages for technology development, strategic and policy aspects of intellectual property rights, linkages between public policy and technological change, industrial clusters, the economics of strategy, and the small-scale sector in India. He received the Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Economics and spent two years as a Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University's Economic Growth Center. He has also worked as a consultant to several international organizations.

 

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.