Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia

The Jindal Distinguished Lecture Series was endowed in perpetuity by Sajjan and Sangita Jindal to promote a serious discussion of politics, economics, social and cultural change in modern India. 

In fall 2012, Kaushik Basu was appointed Chief Economist at the World Bank and is the former Chief Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He is on leave from Cornell University where he is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies. Untill 2009 he was Chairman of the Department of Economics and during 2006-9 he was Director of the Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell.

Earlier he was Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, where in 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi was its first Executive Director. He is also a founding member of the Madras School of Economics.

He is currently (the fourth) president of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, which was founded by Amartya Sen. He has held advisory posts with the ILO, the World Bank, the Reserve Bank of India and was, for several years, member of the steering committee of the Expert Group of Development Issues set up by the Swedish Government. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Exim Bank of India.

Kaushik Basu has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the London School of Economics, where he was Distinguished Visitor in 1993. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard University (Economics Dept) - 2004, Princeton University (Economics Dept) - 1989-91, and M.I.T. (Economics Dept) -2001-02.

He is Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, and served or serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review and the Japanese Economic Review.

A Fellow of the Econometric Society, Kaushik Basu has published widely in the areas of Development Economics, Industrial Organization, Game Theory and Welfare Economics. His books include Analytical Development Economics (1997, MIT Press), Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics (2000, Oxford University Press) and Of People, Of Places: Sketches from an Economist’s Notebook (1994, Oxford University Press). His latest book, An Economist in the Real World: The Art of Policymaking in India (MIT Press 2015), was based on the Jindal lectures he delivered at Brown.

Professor Basu has also contributed popular articles to magazines and newspapers, such as The New York Times, Scientific American, India Today and Business Standard. He also wrote a regular column for BBC News Online. He has appeared on various television programs including CNN (USA), NDTV and CNBC (India) and BBC. In May 2008 he was awarded one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Bhushan, by the President of India.

The lectures are available in the video archive.