Divya Pradeep: Moderator - Divya Pradeep is Associate Professor with the Department of Economics at CHRIST (Deemed to be University). She has 19 years of teaching experience and is the post graduate coordinator for the MA Applied Economics program at Christ. Her teaching and research interests lie in the area of development studies, particularly gender, labour market and livelihood studies. Divya completed her PhD in Economics from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. Her thesis focussed on the role of social capital in determining labour market outcomes among Information Technology professionals in Karnataka. Currently she is working on a pilot research project funded by J-PAL, South Asia on NGO supported maternal health interventions and its impact on the health of pregnant women using Randomised Control Trials (RCTs). Divya had participated in a workshop conducted by Azim Premji University on rethinking undergraduate economics education in India in 2018.
Speaker I- Pulapre Balakrishnan - Pulapre Balakrishnan was born at Klari, his ancestral village in Kerala, India in 1955. He was educated at Moscow, Madras and New Delhi, and trained as an economist at Oxford and Cambridge. His published work spans the inflationary process, the measurement of productivity, the transition to a market economy in post-communist Europe, agricultural decline in Kerala and economic growth in India. Though published in the profession's journals, he is perhaps better known for his books 'Pricing and Inflation in India' (OUP, 1991) and 'Economic Growth in India: History and Prospect' (OUP, 2010). He has held appointments at Oxford University, the Indian Statistical Institute at Delhi and the Indian Institute of Management at Kozhikode. Further, he has served as Country Economist for Ukraine at the World Bank and as a consultant to the ILO, RBI and UNDP. During 2010-13 he was the Director of the Centre for Development Studies at Thiruvananthapuram. Currently Professor of Economics of Ashoka University, Sonipat, he has for three decades by now intervened in the public debate on India's economy through his popular writing. Balakrishnan is a recipient of the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contribution to Development Studies (2014). Speaker II- Arjun Jayadev- Arjun Jayadev is the Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University. He teaches Economics at the University and has previously taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is also a Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and was an inaugural post-doctoral fellow at the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.
His research combines quantitative and theoretical analysis of Finance, Development, Political Economy and Intellectual Property. He has also been closely involved with the CORE economics project.
Speaker III- Chirashree Das Gupta- Chirashree Das Gupta is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi. Her research and teaching has been focused on different dimensions of the political economy of institutions with a focus on patriarchy, race, caste and class and the role of law in the political economy of accumulation in trade, finance and industrialization and public policy. She has worked on the relationship between personal laws, tax and corporate governance in India. Her recent work focuses on gender, labour and social reproduction.Her major journal publications have been in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Rivista di Politica Economica, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, and Economic and Political Weekly. Her book titled State and Capital in Independent India: Institutions and Accumulation has been published by Cambridge University Press in October 2016.