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Editorial : Profile

Name Surname

Ashok Kotwal

University of British Columbia

Ashok Kotwal served as the Editor-in-Chief of Ideas for India from 2012 to 2022.

He was Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He served as the Head of the Department from 1995-2000 and as the Director, Centre for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia from 2003 to 2008. His research has focused on development issues such as the process of poverty decline, labour and credit markets in developing countries, the role of agriculture in development, the role of international trade, and rural governance. More recently, he had been engaged in the study of poverty alleviation schemes such as Public Distribution System and MNREGA (Employment Guarantee Act).

Posts by Ashok Kotwal

Winner of Infosys Prize 2018 in Social Sciences: Sendhil Mullainathan

The Infosys Prize 2018 for Social Sciences has been awarded to Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science, University of Chicago, for his path-breaking work in behavioural e...

Winner of Infosys Prize 2018 in Social Sciences: Sendhil Mullainathan

The Infosys Prize 2018 for Social Sciences has been awarded to Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science, University of Chicago, for his path-breaking work in behavioural e...

GST Explainer: Introduction

Seventeen years after its framework was formed, India’s biggest tax reform – the goods and services tax – was rolled out on 1 July 2017. Some consider the ‘one nation, one tax’ system to be ...

Aadhaar that doesn’t exclude

Aadhaar is in the news today partly because of security concerns and partly because of reports that the poor are unable to receive PDS rations because of failures in Aadhaar authentication. In this ar...

Ashok Kotwal speaks with Jean Drèze

I4I Editor-in-Chief Ashok Kotwal speaks with Jean Drèze, visiting Professor at Ranchi University and an ‘economist-activist’ who has been working in India at the grassroots level for a long time...

The challenge of job creation

The process of economic transformation that entails labour transitioning from low- to high-productivity activities, been much slower in India than in other Asian countries like China. Why is this so ...

Introducing a new feature: – ‘Explainers’

Our day-to-day lives are tossed around due to economic changes, resulting sometimes from government policies and sometimes by unidentifiable forces of the world economy. Governments always label every...

Humanising economics

In a tribute to Richard Thaler, recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, Ashok Kotwal and Nalini Gulati discuss his pioneering work on decision-making that lies in the space between econom...

Debate: The Aadhaar Bill

In a debate on the Aadhaar Bill, commentators from academia and civil society will weigh in on issues around potential benefits and privacy concerns.

Introduction to e-Symposium: Ideas for reforms in education policy in India

A New Education Policy is being formulated in India based on a time-bound grassroots consultative process. As a contribution to the discussions, Rukmini Banerji of the education NGO Pratham and Ashok...

A symposium on Piketty: Introduction

Thomas Piketty’s book on ´Capital in the Twenty First Century’ has made waves. The fact that a 700-odd page tome full of numbers and graphs can become an international bestseller is itself notewo...

Response to the Bhagwati-Panagariya rejoinder on MNREGA

In a recent article, Abreu et al. refuted the Bhagwati-Panagariya argument for phasing out MNREGA in favour of cash transfers. In this article, Abreu et al. respond to claims in a rejoinder by Bhagwa...