Course Description:

This course is an overview of the relationship between the Political and the Policy systems in India, to appreciate the impact that policy decisions have upon the political arena and vice versa. The course is designed to cover the key policy related shifts and the implementation of associated programmes on the one hand, and their impact upon political arenas, as understood by scholarly analyses. Through this interaction between politics and policy, the course provides a historical overview of the welfare state and politics, from the era of planning to the early decades of liberalization, till the contemporary dispensation of the administrative state. To provide a framework to understand the overview, the course begins with a survey of key approaches to understanding the practice of public policy and ends with a survey of some ethical frameworks to assess public policies. However, the substantive core of the course focusses on the political analysis of policy changes over the years in India.

Some of the questions that motivate the discussions in this course are the following. What are the key policy approaches that help us better understand the thinking behind policy design and implementation? What are the essential perspectives that have informed policy making in India over the decades and how have they in turn affected political arenas in terms of who gets what and why? Finally, what are the various ways to assess policies in terms of their contribution to the greater public good?

The course fits into the larger programme as it provides students a foundational understanding of the political dimensions that undergird public policy systems and their impact upon the public sphere.

The course seeks to take the place of the Law, Politics and Society course that was part of the curricula of the earlier version of the Programme. The content of the latter course could now inform the contents of the State, Law and Policy course being offered under the new programme in Trimester 2 as the contents of both courses are similar. The contents of this course (Politics and Policy) seem more directly aligned to the title of this course as they are pitched at a level to draw our attention to the practice of politics and policy and not so much at the foundational normative principles that inform the design of the state, law and their effects upon society.