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408. India’s Development Odyssey
Devesh Kapur, Arvind Subramanian with Ramachandra Guha
Speakers
What happens when one-sixth of humanity undertakes the world’s most complex development experiment?
In A Sixth of Humanity, renowned political scientist Devesh Kapur and former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian unpack India’s audacious journey of nation-building and economic transformation. Blending democracy, socialism, and liberalization in an unprecedented way, India has charted a “precocious” path to development—one that defies conventional models and continues to reshape global geopolitics and economics.
Through this conversation, the authors reflect on India’s unique development trajectory, the paradoxes that define it, and what it reveals about the future of large, diverse democracies.
In this episode of BIC Talks, Devesh Kapur, Arvind Subramanian are in a conversation with Ramachandra Guha. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in Oct 2025.
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Speakers
Devesh Kapur
Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His work explores the evolution of India’s public institutions, governance, and higher education, tracing how economic and social transformations shape the state and its citizens. He is the author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order and the State, and Diaspora, Development, and Democracy. Previously at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, Kapur’s scholarship bridges rigorous empirical research and deep policy insight, examining how India’s democratic experiment continually reinvents itself through migration, education, and institutional reform.
Arvind Subramanian
Arvind Subramanian is Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. With a career spanning the IMF, GATT, and leading universities including Harvard and Ashoka, he brings a global lens to India’s economic evolution. His influential books, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance and Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy, blend analytical clarity with an understanding of India’s institutional and fiscal realities. Through his research and policymaking, Subramanian has helped illuminate the choices and trade-offs shaping India’s economic growth, equity, and resilience in a rapidly changing world.
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha is one of India’s most acclaimed historians and public intellectuals. His works — including India After Gandhi, The Unquiet Woods, and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World — trace the making of India’s modern identity through politics, environment, and moral leadership. Translated into over twenty languages, his writing blends archival depth with narrative elegance. Guha has taught at Stanford, LSE, and the Indian Institute of Science, and is now Distinguished University Professor at Krea University. Recipient of the Sahitya Akademi and Fukuoka Prizes, he continues to explore how ideas, institutions, and individuals sustain India’s plural and evolving republic.
