Governance from the Bottom-up: Panchayats and Fiscal Federalism

11.00 AM - 11.45 AM, 1st October 2022 | Silver Oak Hall, India Habitat Centre

How should India reimagine fiscal federalism from the bottom up? What can be done at the local level must be done at that level of government. This principle of subsidiarity is at the heart of what shaped fiscal federalism. Yet, in Indian debates and policy choices, this very foundational principle is routinely ignored. What does fiscal federalism look like from the bottom up and what will it take for India to take local governance seriously? How should states reorient their fiscal architecture to strengthen local governments and ensure that funds, functions and functionaries follow principles of subsidiarity? This conversation with the Finance Minister of Andhra Pradesh will explore this critical but much ignored element of fiscal federalism in India.

Panel members:

• Hon'ble Buggana Rajendranath Reddy, Minister of Finance & Planning, Commercial Taxes, Legislative Affairs, Skill Development & Training, Andhra Pradesh

• Yamini Aiyar, President and Chief Executive, CPR

India in an Altered Geopolitical Landscape: How Foreign Policy is Leveraging a Challenging External Environment for the Transformation of India

12.00 PM - 1.00 PM, 1st October 2022 | Silver Oak Hall, India Habitat Centre

The rapidly changing global order presents many challenges for India. How can these challenges be transformed into opportunities? How can Indian foreign policy respond to the external environment and take a leadership role in the South Asian neighborhood and the rest of the world? This session will explore such questions.

Panel members:

• Shyam Saran, Senior Fellow, CPR and Former Indian Foreign Secretary

• Sushant Singh, Senior Fellow, CPR

A Conversation with Adam Tooze and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

1.15 PM - 2.15 PM, 1st October 2022 | Silver Oak Hall, India Habitat Centre

For this session, Pratap Bhanu Mehta will be in conversation with Adam Tooze. Pratap Bhanu Mehta is the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University and Honorary Senior Fellow at CPR. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University. Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. In 2019, Foreign Policy Magazine named him one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade.

Session speakers include:

• Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director, European Institute, Columbia University

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Honorary Senior Fellow, CPR and Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching, Princeton University

India's G-20 Moment: Shaping the Global Energy Transition and Climate Action

2.30 PM - 3.45 PM, 1st October 2022 | Silver Oak Hall, India Habitat Centre

India will hold the G-20 Presidency from December 2022, and one of the agendas is global energy transition and climate change. India’s Presidency occurs when calls for climate action are increasingly urgent, countries are gearing up for a green energy transition and are seeking to stimulate industrial development in areas such as battery technology and a potential hydrogen economy. For a developing country like India, are such strategic directions a pathway to development or a distracting chimera?

The emergent concept of ‘Lifestyle for Environment’ (LiFE), which advocates for behavioural changes and was introduced by India’s PM, also carries implications for infrastructure investment – behavioural changes require complementary shifts in infrastructure. For countries yet to build their infrastructure, this concept provides a way to think through the demand side of a green energy transition.

This discussion will focus on how India can use these opportunities to shape the global energy transition.

Panel members are:

• Amitabh Kant, India’s G-20 Sherpa and Former Chief Executive Officer, NITI Aayog, Government of India

• Kelly Sims Gallagher, Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy, Fletcher School, Tufts University

• Moderated by: Navroz K Dubash, Professor, Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment, CPR

Internal Migration and Evolving Policy Frameworks for Governance

2.15 PM - 3.30 PM , 1st October 2022 | Gulmohar, India Habitat Centre

COVID-19 brought to light the magnitude of labour migration and the transformative role of human mobility in India’s economic growth story. It pushed the Union and state governments, employers and civil society to address the problems that internal migrants face in diverse ways but a coherent and inclusive policy articulation for addressing the exclusions faced by migrants is yet to emerge. This session brings together expert voices to integrate the lessons from ongoing, multi-sectoral initiatives on registration, service delivery, social protection, grievance redressal and safety of migrant households, especially at the level of state and local governments. It will deliberate on key challenges like institutional fragmentation, paucity of data, state capacity and political inclusion and build a conversation around the processes, institutions, information systems and technology platforms required to evolve effective policy frameworks to govern internal migration.

CPR, India Migration Now and LEAD at Krea University will launch a new initiative on migration research as part of this panel.

Panel members are:

• Hon'ble Manoj Jha, Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), India

• I A Kundan, Principal Secretary Women and Child Development Department, Government of Maharashtra

• Amrita Datta, Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Hyderabad

• Rajiv Khandelwal, Executive Director, Ajeevika Bureau

• Moderated by: Mukta Naik, Fellow, Initiative on Cities, Economy and Society, CPR

Building a Fit for Purpose Fiscal Architecture for India

4.00 PM- 5.45 PM , 1st October 2022 | Silver Oak Hall, India Habitat Centre

The state of State finances lies at the center of the public policy discourse in India. However, they rarely receive adequate consideration especially in debates on designing public finance management, fiscal rules and on the nature of planning and budget in 21st-century policymaking. This session will seek to dive into these questions through a focus on State finance. It will traverse questions of fiscal federalism and shifts that have occurred in state finances on account of GST. Crucially, it will focus on the challenge of fiscal management at the State level. While the debate on fiscal rules and the macro fiscal framework find significant place in debates at the national level, the role of state governments and specifically the need to design an appropriate, decentralised framework for fiscal management has less discussion at the State level. This panel will seek to touch upon these issues.

The panel will begin with a presentation on the findings from the India Manifesto Project that maps out Lok Sabha election manifestos of the Congress, the BJP and the CPI(M) since 1952. The three parties represent the ideological spectrum of Indian politics, and the study maps the evolution of issues that matter to Indian democracy.

Presentation by: Rahul Verma, Fellow, The Politics Initiative, CPR

Panel members:

• Hon'ble Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Minister for Finance and Human Resources Management, Government of Tamil Nadu

• Rathin Roy, Senior Visiting Fellow, CPR and Managing Director, Overseas Development Institute

• Moderated by: Yamini Aiyar, President and Chief Executive, CPR