News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
As a fresh faced civil servant on her first posting to Bangalore in 2003, it thrilled me to bits to read the motivational etching on the Vidhana Soudha, Bengaluru’s postcard monument that houses the State Legislature. It says in native Kannada first: Sarkarada kelasa Devara Kelasa and below it, the […]
It is not an overstatement to call India as the generic drug supplier of the world. A recent study indicated that India is the largest exporter of generics (by volume) in the world, accounting for 20% of global export volume. Low prices, strong scientific ability and high quality are the […]
Darjeeling is a district in the Indian state of West Bengal which shares the border with Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. A globally renowned destination right from the days of British colonisation, its landscape, toy train, tea gardens, and timber resource made it a popular destination for visitors throughout the 20th […]
On January 31, 2017, the Home Office in the UK posthumously pardoned more than 50,000 gay and bisexual men, including the literary genius Oscar Wilde under the “Turing Law”. Although not without it critics, this is a powerful symbol of seeking to redress injustice committed against gay men and another […]
Early this year, Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi suspended a government officer in Puducherry, one of the six Union Territories of India, for sending an obscene video in a WhatsApp group dedicated to improving the administration, of which she and other senior bureaucrats were members. Soon the Chief Minister banned the […]
Coldplay performed in India for the first time last weekend. The band was promoting a sanitation campaign at the Global Citizen Festival on World Toilet Day. It was a grand occasion for Indian music lovers and a rare (if not unique) chance for the sub-continent seeing performances from world famous […]
Sitting right in front of the iconic Oxford University Press (OUP), is Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where my classmates (from 55 countries) and I spent the last 12 months grappling with difficult questions of public policy. Our cohort did not shy away from a heated discussion. You could see […]
Recently, Harvard University professor Gita Gopinath has been appointed as financial advisor by the office of Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala, the southernmost state of India. The row that followed has once again opened the debate on the role of academia in the business of government and policy […]