Lakshmi Iyer is an economist in the Business, Government and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. Her primary research fields are political economy and development economics, with a special emphasis on property rights institutions. Her work includes studies of historical and current institutions, such as colonialism and historical land rights in India and land reforms in Vietnam.

Vikram Raghavan is senior counsel in the World Bank’s Legal Vice-Presidency, where he works in two different practice groups. As a member of the East Asia and South Asia group, Mr. Raghavan is country lawyer for the World Bank’s operations in India, Myanmar, and Korea. In that capacity, he provides legal and transactional advice on a variety of constitutional, operational, and local law issues that arise in World Bank-financed projects in those areas.

Dr. Mor has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania with a specialization in Finance from the Wharton School; a Masters degree in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and an undergraduate degree in Physics from the Mumbai University. He is also is a Yale World Fellow (2004).

Chandra Bhan Prasad is widely regarded as the most important Dalit thinker and political commentator in India today, advocating on behalf of the more than 16 percent of India’s population who have historically been regarded as untouchable by orthodox Hinduism. He was the first Dalit to gain a regular column in a national English-language Indian newspaper, more than 50 years after India’s independence. His weekly Dalit Diary has been a regular feature of The Pioneer since 1999, and is routinely translated into other major Indian languages.

Dayamani Barla is a journalist hailing from the Munda tribe in Jharkhand, India. Dayamani’s reportage in the popular Hindi newspaper, Prabhat Khabhar, has brought attention to the displacement of tribal peoples from their native lands by developers, and the myriad other problems that face tribal communities. Her groundbreaking work has been instrumental in exposing the hazards posed by uranium mining to children in rural areas. Her work is constantly guided by her concern for the plight of the weakest and the most exploited sections of Indian society.

The current “kidney racket” scandal in the Delhi satellite city of Gurgaon--in which accusations that a man posing as a transplant surgeon ran a kidney transplant clinic for eight years, serving an international clientele and not only buying kidneys from poor sellers but extorting them--raises immediate questions about the structure of medical regulation and the epidemiology, forensics, and ethics of the kidney trade. To answer such questions, a class of experts (including Cohen) has proliferated to study and adjudicate these scandals and the everyday practices they suspend.

Developments such as the rapid growth of the Indian economy, the movement of technology jobs to India, the emergence of a strong Indian software industry and the announcement of the development of the world’s cheapest car have raised concerns here about whether India could emerge as a serious rival on technological innovation to the United States. In this talk, Professor Krishnan will give you his assessment of the likelihood of this happening drawing on data collected for a book that he is writing on this subject.