In 1977, when M. G. Ramachandran, a megastar in Tamil cinema, was sworn in as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, he became the first Indian actor to hold that prestigious office. Over the next few decades, M.G.R. and others with deep connections to the film world continued to hold the state’s top elected office. Notable names included M. Karunanidhi, a five-term Chief Minister and screenwriter, and J.

India is in transition but not all Indians are able to prosper. The country’s growth story has been characterized by widening inequality and a failure of the state to lift its citizens out of poverty and other forms of economic deprivation such as undernutrition among children. While some forms of anti-poverty welfare programs have existed throughout independent India’s history, they had limited impact.

The global quest for digital transformation has found a new champion in the form of digital public infrastructure (DPI). The United Nations has identified DPI—digital building blocks operating at a societal scale in fields like digital identity and digital payments—as a high-impact initiative for achieving the sustainable development goals.

Over the past seven weeks of CASI Election Conversations 2024, we tackled a host of key factors of India’s political economy—federalism, welfare, gender quotas,

In 2019, despite widespread economic distress and the failure of flagship policy moves like demonetization, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were re-elected to power, with a bigger victory in parliamentary elections than their 2014 success.

Fears about the effects of misinformation on Indian politics seem omnipresent today. Reports suggest huge volumes of “fake news” and misleading content filling up WhatsApp groups and social media feeds, with potentially dangerous consequences. The advent of generative AI and “deepfakes” have only made those concerns more immediate.

But how big is the misinformation problem in India? What do we know about it? And what can we do to address it?

Indian voters don’t care about ideology and are not particularly attached to parties. They “vote their caste” rather than cast their vote. They also rarely coordinate well in picking candidates, leading to tremendous volatility in election outcomes. Those are just some of the long-standing stereotypes that recent research on India has sought to upend.