The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) is delighted to invite you to a seminar titled “A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey” on Thursday, December 18, 2025, from 4:00 to 5:30 pm (IST) at the CSEP Auditorium, 6, Dr Jose P Rizal Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi – 110021.

The seminar will feature a presentation by Arvind Subramanian, Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics and Former Chief Economic Adviser, Govt. of India, and Devesh Kapur, Starr Foundation Professor – South Asia Studies, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The presentation will be followed by a discussion with Laveesh Bhandari, President, CSEP and Priyadarshini Singh, Fellow, CSEP. The session will be chaired and moderated by Rakesh Mohan, President Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow, CSEP, and Former Deputy Governor, RBI.

Please note that this is an in-person event only. If you are in Delhi on the day, please join us for the seminar. The event will be available on the CSEP website and YouTube channel upon completion.

Register here to attend

About the event

The seminar is based on Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur’s new book, which traces India’s development trajectory and how it tried to achieve four transformations: building a state, forging a nation, transforming society, and creating an economy and markets, all under conditions of Universal Franchise-based democratic politics. It highlights the various pathologies and paradoxes along this journey as well as draws out the key themes characterising India’s development.

Presenters

Arvind Subramanian

Arvind Subramanian is Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). Previously, he has taught at Brown, Ashoka and Harvard Universities. He served as the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India between 2014 and 2018. He currently also advises state governments on macro-economic, fiscal and sectoral issues. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers in 2011.

As chief economic adviser, his annual Economic Survey of India, became a widely read document on Indian economic policy and development. The 2018 Survey had 20 million views from over 190 countries in its first year of publication. His reflections on his tenure were published as “Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Jaitley-Modi Economy.” His critically acclaimed book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, sold over 130,000 copies and was translated into 4 languages.

Devesh Kapur

Devesh Kapur is Starr Foundation Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His recent books include The Other One Percent: Indians in America; Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance; Internal Security in India: Violence, Order and the State; The Oxford Handbook of Higher Education in Asia and the Pacific; and A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey (co-authored with Arvind Subramanian). He earlier taught at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania.

Chair & Moderator

Rakesh Mohan

Rakesh Mohan is President Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP).

He served as President and Distinguished Fellow at CSEP from October 2020 to May 2023. Since October 2021, he has been a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC-PM), and in March 2024, he was appointed to the World Bank Group’s Economic Advisory Panel.

Dr Mohan was part of the team that was instrumental in formulating India’s economic reforms from the late 1980s onwards. His distinguished public service includes positions as Executive Director on the Board of the International Monetary Fund, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Secretary of Economic Affairs, and Chief Economic Adviser at the Ministry of Finance, as well as Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Industry.

He has chaired several government committees that produced landmark reports on infrastructure, including The India Infrastructure Report (1996), The Indian Railways Report (2001), and The India Transport Report (2014). Following the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, he co-chaired the G20 Working Group on Enhancing Sound Regulation and Strengthening Transparency (2009), and the CGFS/BIS Working Group on Capital Flows and Emerging Market Economies (2009).

Before joining CSEP, Dr Mohan was Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (2010-11; 2016-20), Yale University and Professor in the Practice of International Economics and Finance at Yale School of Management (2010–12). He has also been Distinguished Consulting Professor at Stanford University (2009) and Distinguished Fellow at Brookings India.

He is the author of three books on urban economics and development, two on monetary policy—Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy: A Practitioner’s View (2009), and Growth with Financial Stability: Central Banking in an Emerging Market—and the edited volume India Transformed: 25 Years of Economic Reforms.

Dr Mohan holds a BSc (Eng) from Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London (1969); a BA from Yale University (1971); and an MA (1974) and PhD (1977) in Economics from Princeton University.

Discussants

Laveesh Bhandari

Laveesh Bhandari is President and a Senior Fellow at CSEP.  Dr Bhandari has published widely on subjects related to sustainable livelihoods, industrial, economic, and social reforms in India, economic geography, and financial inclusion. He received his PhD in economics from Boston University for which he was awarded the Best Thesis in International Economics. He has taught economics at Boston University and IIT Delhi. Apart from applied economics research, Dr Bhandari has built, seeded, and exited from three companies in the research, analytics, and digital domains, including Indicus Analytics, a leading economic research firm. Currently, he is conducting research on issues of inclusion, India’s energy transition, and how it will impact the government as well as the economy.

Priyadarshini Singh

Priyadarshini Singh is a Fellow with the Human Development research program at CSEP. She has previously worked with the Centre for Policy Research- New Delhi, Ashoka University and PwC-India. She completed a PhD at the Department of Politics and International Relations at SOAS, University of London as a Felix Scholar. Her research work focuses on political economy of policy-making with a focus on education, history of public institutions and grassroots political ideas and politics. Her recent publication is ‘Ideas, Policies and Practices: Tracing the evolution of elementary education reform from 1975’ (2023 PE05- RISE program at University of Pennsylvania).

Priyadarshini is a member of the Karnataka State Education Policy Commission (2024 onwards).

All content reflects the individual views of the speakers. The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) does not hold an institutional view on any subject.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.