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.