IFMR LEAD, at Institute for Financial Management and Research, and College of Agricultural Banking-RBI successfully organized their 6th international conference on financial inclusion and livelihood finance, titled “Translating Research into Policy and Action,” held at the College of Agricultural Banking campus in Pune, Maharastra, on January 16th and 17th, 2015. The conference was well received among practitioners, representing a wide range of sectors from banking industry, microfinance, government departments, and academia.

Shri H R Khan, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India addressed the conference at the inaugural session. Mr. Khan discussed the importance of evidence based decision making where both policy and practice can inform high quality research and vice versa. At the valedictory session, Shri S S Mundra, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India also voiced the need of bridging the gap between policymaking and research. He opined the need to increase our understanding of the…

Karthik Muralidharan, Associate Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego speaks with Kaushik Basu, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, World Bank and former Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India, on the World Bank’s global development agenda; inequality and the design of anti-poverty policies; contribution of recent academic research to development policy; research evidence, political economy and policymaking; State capacity for implementation; and law and economics.

Introduction and the global development agenda of the World Bank

Karthik Muralidharan (KM):It is my pleasure to welcome Kaushik Basu to the ‘Ideas for India Conversation Series’. This is the second of these and we hope to use this platform to have deep, engaged discussions. In a world of sound bite journalism and ‘gotcha’, big-fight TV studio dynamics, there is really a missing market for deep, engaged discussion of ideas. I am particularly delighted to have Prof. Basu here given his academic…