NLS faculty member Dr. Aparna Chandra will be part of a panel discussion on “House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy” on April 14, 2023 at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) at 6.00 pm.

Abstract:

While there is overwhelming support for democracy in India and voter turnout is higher than in many Western democracies, there are low levels of trust in political parties and elected representatives. House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy, written by Ronojoy Sen, looks beyond Indian elections, which has increasingly occupied analysts and commentators, and focuses on the Lok Sabha. The book examines two broad questions: Is the Indian Parliament, which has the unenviable task of representing a diverse nation of a billion-plus people, working, if not in an exemplary manner, at least reasonably well, to articulate the diverse demands of the electorate and translate them into legislation and policy? To what extent has the practice of Indian democracy transformed the institution of parliament, which was adopted from the British, and its functioning?

The author will be in conversation with Aparna Chandra and Rajeev Gowda, moderated by Nitin Pai. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

About the Speakers

Ronojoy Sen, Author & Senior Research Fellow, National University of Singapore

Dr Ronojoy Sen is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies and the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He has worked for over a decade with leading Indian newspapers, most recently as an editor for The Times of India. His latest book is House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is also the author of Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press/Penguin, 2015) and Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court (Oxford University Press, 2010; revised ed. 2018) and has edited several books. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago and read history at Presidency College, Calcutta.

Dr. Aparna Chandra, Associate Professor, NLSIU

Dr. Aparna Chandra is an Associate Professor of Law at National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Her areas of teaching and research are constitutional law, human rights, legal theory, gender and the law, and judicial process reform. Her on-going research includes a collaboration with the Israel Democracy Institute on a European Research Council funded multi-nation study titled Proportionality and Public Policy; a University of Chicago funded research project titled Empirical Analysis of Indian Supreme Court decisions; and a collaboration with the Centre for Reproductive Rights, New York on a book on Reproductive Justice in India.

Aparna received her LL.M and JSD degrees from Yale Law School in 2007 and 2013, respectively. She was a Lillian Goldman Scholar at Yale Law School from 2010-2012. Her doctoral dissertation (under the supervision of Judith Resnik and guidance of Bruce Ackerman and Alec Stone Sweet) examined the role of international law in domestic constitutional adjudication, with a primary focus on the Indian Supreme Court.

M V Rajeev Gowda, Politician & Academician

Professor Rajeev Gowda is Ex-Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha from Karnataka. He has a B.A from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore, an MA in Economics from Fordham University and a PhD in Public Policy and Management from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and taught at the University of Oklahoma. Until recently, he was Professor of Economics and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and a Director on the Central Board of the Reserve Bank of India. He has authored and edited books, scholarly articles and reports on policy issues. He has mentored start up companies and works on urban renewal and youth empowerment, among other areas of interest. He has been a Carnegie Council Global Ethics Fellow.

He is the Managing Trustee, Resurgent India Trust, which launched the Bengaluru Needs You initiative.

Nitin Pai, Co-Founder & Director, Takshashila Institution

Nitin Pai is co-founder and director of the Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy; and author of Nitopadesha: Moral Tales for Good Citizens. His current research includes information warfare, the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific. He teaches international relations, public policy and ethical reasoning at Takshashila’s graduate programmes. He is currently a columnist with Mint, ThePrint and Sakal, and a non-resident fellow at the Institute for South Asian Studies, Singapore.

Pai spent over a decade at the Telecommunications Authority of Singapore (TAS) and its successor the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) in broadband development and technology foresight. He has also worked with SingTel’s international connectivity business and undersea cable projects. He was a gold medalist from the National University of Singapore’s LKY School of Public Policy, an undergraduate scholar at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and an alum of National College, Bangalore.

 

About the Book 

A panel of scholars and musicians will engage in a discussion with author Sebanti Chatterjee on her recent book, Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (published by Bloomsbury Academic, February 2023). The book uses the lens of sound and musical practices to tell the stories of two Christian communities in Goa and Meghalaya and introduces voice and genre as social objects. Given the imperial pasts of both regions, the book inquires how indigenous and cosmopolitan forces shape the sacred music repositories and their manifestations. The book takes us on a fascinating sojourn through seminaries, Bollywood Broadway, festivals, recitals, and belonging. Through the rituals of performativity and everyday interpretations of devotion, choral voices illuminate the interior and public lives of the sacred.

About the Speakers 

Sebanti Chatterjee, Senior Academic Fellow, NLSIU Bangalore, is a cultural anthropologist, who is currently a Senior Academic Fellow at the National Law School of India University Bangalore. She holds a doctorate in Sociology. Her monograph, Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in Feb 2023. Sebanti's research interests span sound studies, gender studies, and religious studies. She has previously held regular and ad-hoc teaching positions at Sharda University, Greater Noida; Christ University, Bangalore; University of Delhi; and IIT Jodhpur. She has presented her work both nationally and internationally. Her research has been published in the journals of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and Society and Culture in South Asia. Sebanti also writes for children and occasionally wears the hat of a storyteller.

Karl Lutchmayer, Pianist, is equally renowned as a concert pianist and a lecturer. A Steinway Artist, Karl performs across the globe, and has worked with conductors including Lorin Maazel and Sir Andrew Davis, and performed at all the major London concert halls. He has broadcast on BBC Television and Radio, All India Radio and Classic FM, and is a regular chamber performer. A passionate advocate of contemporary music, Karl has also given over 90 world premieres and had many works written especially for him.

Sarbani Sharma, Assistant Professor, Azim Premji University, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her work focuses on itineraries of political aspirations for freedom and everyday life in Kashmir. She has previously taught Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, Germany, and at the University of Delhi. Her research has been published in the Journal of Human Rights, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Society and Culture in South Asia, Allegra Labs, and Political and Legal Anthropological Review.

To RSVP, click here

Our next public lecture will be delivered by Prof. (Dr.) Francis Cody on his recently published book, The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (Chicago 2023). The lecture will take place on April 6, 2023 at 5 pm.

About the Speaker: 

Dr. Francis Cody is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on politics, language, and media in southern India. His first book, The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (Cornell 2013), won the 2014 Edward Sapir Book Prize awarded by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Cody’s new book, The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (Chicago 2023) explores questions of law, technology, and violence in the context of journalism and populist politics.

Book Abstract:

In the hypermediated world of Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody studies how “news events” are made. Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a “news event” is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event, Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news. And subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports.

The event is open to all. We look forward to seeing you at the session!

This faculty seminar will feature a conversation between NLS faculty members Dr. Aniket Nandan and  Dr. Karthick Ram Manoharan on his book titled “Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism” (Orient Blackswan, 2022). Dr. Manoharan published an article in 2020 titled “Freedom from God: Periyar and Religion” which carries the crux of the book’s argument. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A session.

Abstract

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy (1879-1973) was a rationalist anti-caste leader from South India. Known for his critical views on caste, nationalism, gender, and social justice, he earned a controversial reputation in his lifetime and after for his views on religion. Criticized by his opponents for being a ‘crude atheist’, Periyar’s critique of religion however was not a simple rejection of god, but a critique of political theology. In Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism, Manoharan discusses Periyar’s controversial, sometimes contradictory, but overall nuanced approach to religion, and explores how his criticisms of religion were fundamentally rooted in an opposition to hierarchical social power and a concern for social justice. The first academic book in English to explore this subject, Manoharan reads Periyar in the anarchist tradition, drawing comparisons with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, to consider how Periyar was critical of both divine and secular power. With an elaborate introduction that places Periyar in historical and intellectual context, the other chapters discuss Periyar’s political atheism, his approach to Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Marxism, and concludes with a discussion of his relevance for contemporary debates on secularism and post-secularism.

The Institute of Public Policy, NLSIU along with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and its Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) is organising a three-day conference on ‘Inclusive Development: Role of Employment and Environment’ from March 28-30, 2023. The conference will focus on inclusive development, especially the role of employment opportunities in a changing world of work and the environment in envisioning inclusiveness. The program will include contributions from senior academicians, policy makers and legal professionals as well paper-presentations from selected young scholars from across the subcontinent.

DAY 1: March 28, 2023 | 6 pm – 8 pm

Keynote Talk: Structural Labour Discrimination in India
Speaker: Prof. Jens Lerche, Professor, Agrarian and Labour Studies, SOAS, University of London 
Bangalore International Centre  

This presentation focuses on structural labour discrimination at the bottom of the labour hierarchy in India. Globally, labour market discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender and place is well documented. This is also the case for work related inequalities and discrimination along the lines of caste and ethnicity in India.

Combining labour market data with qualitative studies, this presentation by Jens Lerche shows that structural discrimination is central to labour market segmentation, also in the modern economy. This follows lines of caste, ethnicity and place.

Seasonal labour migrants, and among them especially Adivasis and Dalits, undertake the hardest, lowest paid hyper-precarious informalised jobs, often without access to the same rights as local labourers. They do this at the the cost of their and their household’s long-time social reproduction and care which is externalised by the employers. This is a result not only of direct labour market discrimination but is also based on discrimination in access to skill and historical disadvantage. The presentation concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations.

RSVP here.

DAY 2: March 29, 2023

Panel discussion & Paper Presentations 
NLSIU, Bengaluru

Can technological change lead to an inclusive future of work and promote inclusive development?Adoption of new technologies such as automation, AI and industrial robots in the production process continues to grow rapidly in every country. The question that has emerged globally is the impact of these technologies on employment and on overall society. In the context of a developing country with already existing inequality and social exclusion, the question is twofold: what is the future of work and is the future of work inclusive? This is a critical juncture for discussions around labour as technology has brought about not only a rapidly changing workforce, but also workplace scenarios. The emergence of gig and platform work has introduced labour law to new challenges where the employment relationship is digitally mediated and involves the algorithmic management of labour. As a response to this, lawmakers and workers’ organizations have experimented with different approaches: ranging from the demands for a bare minimum of social security and transparency in working conditions to a more comprehensive, worker-centred transformation of how gig and platform work is structured.

The ultimate effects of technological progress on labour relations will be determined by how it is used and how people, firms, governments, institutions, and international organizations respond and prepare for these changes in the economy and society. This panel will discuss these challenges faced by a developing country like India and reflect on possible ways forward, with a focus on gig and platform work.

Featuring: Prof. Bino Paul (TISS), Prof. Vijay G (Hyderabad University), Dr. Manjunath (Additional Labour Commissioner, Industrial Relations –
Government of Karnataka), Jane Cox (Attorney, India – Labor and Trade Unions), Chair: Prof. Babu Mathew (National Law School of India University)

DAY 3: March 30, 2023

Panel discussion & Paper presentations
NLSIU, Bengaluru

How can inequalities and injustices of pollution be accounted for in envisioning inclusive development? Impacts of pollution (including climate change), while ubiquitous, vary in pattern and strength across regions as well as across socio-economic groups within a region. On the one hand, disadvantaged groups are more exposed and susceptible to pollution related damages with limited ability to cope and recover from the losses. On the other hand, socioeconomic inequalities further facilitate the obstruction of climate policies by wealthy elites, undermine public support for the policy, and weaken the social foundations of collective action. This panel will discuss how such environment related outcomes of must feature in the conceptualization of inclusive development.

The conference will conclude with a session on “Consolidation & Future Research Collaborations” involving a summary of the conference, an open discussion on potential future research collaborations, and opportunities for continued involvement.

For more details about the programme, please click here.
Please note, this conference is for invitees registered participants only.
For further information, please write to ,

NLSIU will be conducting a second live information session on the Master’s Programme in Public Policy on March 31, 2023 from 5 p.m. – 6 p.m. This online information session will provide information on preparing for the NLSAT – MPP and the test pattern. Faculty will also discuss sample questions during the session.

Panel of speakers:

• DR. SNEHA THAPLIYAL, Associate Professor, Economics, NLSIU
• DR. RINKU LAMBA, Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, NLSIU

Please note, only candidates who have completed the registration process (i.e. those who have completed the payment for the NLSAT-MPP) will be eligible to attend the information session. Candidates who have already completed their registration may login to the admissions portal (admissions.nls.ac.in) and click on the webinar link to register for the information session.

If you are planning to appear for the NLSAT – MPP, don’t forget to complete your registration before the event. For queries or assistance, please write to

We look forward to meeting you at the session!

Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India) Chair on IPR, CIPRA, National Law School of India University, Bangalore, KIIT School of Law, Bhubaneswar, Odisha organise an International Round Table: A Conference on “Evolving trends for an International Regime on Intellectual property, Genetic Resources and Associated TK”.

Concept Note 

The genetic resources that are ‘genetic materials of actual or potential value’ have increasing interlink with Intellectual Property and Traditional knowledge. The value of Genetic Resource as an IP as well as its association with IP has been discussed on different fora in different contexts. The WIPO-IGC established in 2000 has been debating for more than two decades issues pertaining to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. Beginning with an initial non-normative approach looking at defensive protection, to need for a legal instrument in 2003, through a ‘text-based negotiations’ decision in 2010-11, the ‘intersessional working groups’ leading progress, the emergence of single negotiating text and options around new patent disclosure requirement in 2012, and finally the Chair’s draft international legal instrument on GRs and associated TK in 2019 WIPO-IGC has trodden the turfs. The Chair’s draft is considered as the ‘basic proposal’ on which the negotiations will continue leading to diplomatic conference.

Read more

The genetic resources that are ‘genetic materials of actual or potential value’ have increasing interlink with Intellectual Property and Traditional knowledge. The value of Genetic Resource as an IP as well as its association with IP has been discussed on different fora in different contexts. The WIPO-IGC established in 2000 has been debating for more than two decades issues pertaining to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. Beginning with an initial non-normative approach looking at defensive protection, to need for a legal instrument in 2003, through a ‘text-based negotiations’ decision in 2010-11, the ‘inter sessional working groups’ leading progress, the emergence of single negotiating text and options around new patent disclosure requirement in 2012, and finally the Chair’s draft international legal instrument on GRs and associated TK in 2019 WIPO-IGC has trodden the turfs. The Chair’s draft is considered as the ‘basic proposal’ on which the negotiations will continue leading to diplomatic conference.

Readmore

NLSIU will be conducting a second live information session on the LL.B. (Hons.) Programme on March 24, 2023 from 5 p.m. – 6 p.m. This online information session will provide information on preparing for the NLSAT – LLB and the test pattern. Faculty will also solve  sample questions during the session.

Panel of speakers:

• Dr. Mrinal Satish, Dean (Academics) and Professor of Law, NLSIU
• Ms. Sanyukta Chowdhury,  Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU

Please note, only candidates who have completed the registration process (i.e. those who have completed the payment for the NLSAT-LLB) will be eligible to attend the information session. Candidates who have already completed their registration may login to the admissions portal (admissions.nls.ac.in) and click on the webinar link to register for the information session.

If you are planning to appear for the NLSAT – LLB, don’t forget to complete your registration before the event. For queries or assistance, please write to

We look forward to meeting you at the session!

The next public lecture will be delivered by Prof. (Dr.) Rajeev Bhargava on his book titled “Between Hope and Despair: 100 Ethical Reflections on Contemporary India”.

About the speaker

Prof. (Dr.) Rajeev Bhargava is a well-known political theorist whose work on individualism and secularism has  received international acclaim. He is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi (CSDS), and Director of Parekh Institute of Indian Thought, CSDS. He was also CSDS’s Director from 2007 to 2014. Rajeev Bhargava has been a Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and University of Delhi, apart from teaching at several international universities.

About the book

“India’s collective ethical identity is under duress. We don’t seem to currently agree on what our collective good is. Some groups believe that India is finally rediscovering its Hindu identity and becoming a great nation-state. For others, this change has brought us on the verge of losing our civilisational character of being inclusive but not any less Hindu.

Is it possible to bring these groups with divergent views to discuss each other’s point of view? And do so reasonably, with an open mind? Rajeev Bhargava thinks it is. He believes that the legitimate concerns of all those disenchanted with the idea of an inclusive, pluralist India can actually be addressed within the basic framework of India’s constitutional democracy.

Through these short, elegant and lucid reflections on contemporary events, he takes the readers to the founding narrative of the republic and clarifies its ethical ideals. Readers are asked to join the process of reflection, to criticise with empathy, particularly where the moral compass to properly guide individual and collective action is lost and offer positive appraisals where due. If we get the fundamentals of our original ethical vision right, then, Bhargava subtly suggests, we might yet save our country from further polarisation and may even heal some of its divisions.” (Source: Bloomsbury)