Today my guest is Ritam Chaurey, who is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

We talked about structural transformation in India over the last three decades, how firm level behavior responds to regulatory and fiscal changes, how firms choose between capital and labor, or permanent versus contractual labor, land use and factory location, and much more.

Recorded April 29th, 2026.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:01:07) - The Industrial Disputes Act, Permanent Workers, and Contractors
(00:10:14) - Impacts of Reliance on Contract Labor
(00:16:02) - Labor Protections and Their Impact on Firm Behavior
(00:22:35) - Binding Constraints and the Rise of 'Invisible Workers'
(00:27:46) - Labor Supply Preferences in Structural Transformation
(00:34:07) - A 'Bad Law,' Musclemen, and the Evolution of Debt Law in India
(00:40:21) - SARFAESI's Unintended Consequences
(00:46:28) - The Drop in Fixed-Capital Assets
(00:48:57) - The Impact of Judicial Delays on Labor-Capital Substitution
(00:52:41) - The Bankruptcy Code and Marginal Improvements
(00:55:54) - Spillover Benefits of Relaxing Land Use Regulation
(01:04:18) - Location-Specific Subsidies and Barrier Relaxation
(01:06:36) - A Case Study: Uttarakhand and Himachal
(01:13:32) - The Impact of New Bank Branches in Underbanked Communities
(01:23:24) - The Demonetization Shock
(01:29:48) - Outro

Today my guest is Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who is the Laurance Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and former president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. He is the author of various books and edited volumes, has served on various government committees, and is a columnist for the Indian Express.

We talked about the return of nihilism in political life, the hollowing of professional identities, the politics of vishwas, Adam Smith on concentrated power, what it takes to build lasting institutions, the assumptions behind nonalignment, and much more.

Recorded April 3rd, 2026.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:01:11) - The Challenges Facing Liberalism
(00:06:50) - The Erosion of Moral Authority
(00:11:32) - Nationalism, Feminism, and the Arc of History
(00:16:55) - Globalization and the Crisis of Community
(00:22:06) - Sincerity, Context, and Intelligibility in a Digital Age
(00:30:37) - Professional Identities as Sources of Moral Meaning
(00:40:45) - Formal Inclusion and Continued Inequality
(00:45:54) - Concentration of Power and the Distortion of the State
(00:51:37) - The Politics of Vishwas
(01:01:57) - On Caste and the Limits of Identity Politics
(01:05:34) - The Question of Social Trust
(01:14:08) - Trust-Building and Barriers to Desegregation
(01:24:53) - Institutions of Higher Learning
(01:39:31) - The Assumptions of Nonalignment
(01:46:12) - Outro

Today we are releasing a webinar recording from April 24th where Milan Vaishnav and I had a conversation on delimitation in India. Milan is a senior fellow and the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also the host of the excellent Grand Tamasha podcast where this recording will be simultaneously released.

We talked about the failure to pass the 131st constitutional amendment bill in Parliament, the government's intention to reapportion and increase the size of the Lok Sabha, the delimitation freeze pegged to the 1971 census that has survived five decades, why the fiscal bargain between states matters as much as the political bargain, and much more.

Recorded April 24th, 2026.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:01:24) - What is Delimitation?
(00:35:03) - The Politics Behind the Constitutional Amendment
(00:47:38) - The Political Arithmetic
(00:51:53) - The Financial Bargain
(01:30:21) - Outro