Innovating for the System: What Makes Educational Innovations Scalable?
India is reported to have approximately fifteen million NGOs in the education sector. Combined with the proliferation of social enterprises in recent years, the space for non-government education innovations is rapidly becoming a network of cottage industries, with interventions often reinventing the wheel and successful practices not being appropriately leveraged to address India’s learning crisis at scale.
Namami Gange: Can a New Policy Address a Persistent Unholy Mess?
The Ganges, or Ganga, is India’s holiest river, worshipped as a goddess by more than a billion people. It accounts for 47 percent of India’s irrigated land and feeds 500 million citizens. Despite its importance, it is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Rapid population growth, urbanization, and industrial development have raised the levels of domestic as well as industrial pollutants in its waters.
Crisis and Credibility: Ideas, Power, and Political Decision-Making in India
About the Speaker:
Bilal Baloch is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CASI, where he focuses on the political economy of government behavior in India and other developing democracies. While at CASI, Bilal is revising his doctoral dissertation, Crisis, Credibility, and Corruption: How Ideas and Institutions Shape Government Behavior in India, into a monograph.
Citizen and State Across the Rural-Urban Divide: Claim Making, Decentralization, and the Uneven Use of Political Intermediaries
About the Speaker:
Gabi Kruks-Wisner is an Assistant Professor of Politics & Global Studies at The University of Virginia.
The Problem of Inadequate Electricity Across India
Why do the lights go out more often in some Indian states than others? While India has recently seen great gains in generation capacity and rural electrification, many utilities are still trapped in a vicious cycle of underpayment, underinvestment, and dismal performance. The effects are huge: in 2010 the World Bank estimated the cost of electricity shortages at 7 percent of India’s GDP.
Ravinder Kaur
Ravinder Kaur is a Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2015 to February 2018. She has previously taught at the University of Delhi and New York University. Most recently, she offered a course on Gender, Technology, and Society at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Her current research interests are in the areas of the sociology of gender, family, marriage, kinship, middle class, and technology.
Last updated: 06/11/2025