Articles by Saumen Chattopadhyay

The revelations of Pandora and other papers indicating extensive use by Indian entities of the international financial system and offshore corporate structures fit in well with the empirical findings of this article that large scale illicit financial flows have taken place through trade misinvoicing in India’s trade with 19 countries over 2000–18. This article highlights that India is a net recipient of illicit flows, whose actual scale would be higher if commodity level trade data is used in estimating trade misinvoicing.

The ongoing protests by the students against the fee hike in Jawaharlal Nehru University have brought to the fore the contentious issue of adequacy of public funding of universities. Assessing the pros and cons of different sources of funding, focusing on the issue of the fee hike, it is argued that public funding of the universities should remain the most preferred source in a country like India to not only mitigate the possible trade-offs among the three objectives of efficiency, equity, and excellence, but also foster publicness of higher education.

The Academic Performance Indicator, the University Grants Commission's method of assessing teacher performance, curtails academic freedom, reduces all academic engagement to time spent, and has created an academic environment that is driven by competition for points.

This paper brings to the fore problems associated with application of market logic to higher education, which is poised to play an important role in India's pursuit of inclusive growth. In a context where marketisation of higher education continues unabated and the government is keen to encourage private sector involvement, it is necessary to analyse their impact on the three stated objectives of expansion, inclusion and excellence. It is therefore crucial to understand how the market for higher education works and to critically examine the actual impact of the market on education in India. This paper argues that the market logic seriously compromises value and quality of higher education and this weakens our ability to build an inclusive society.