A peek into eco research at Indian Ivy Leagues/ Think tanks

I have noted there is a lot of research flowing from educational institutions/ think-tanks on impact of crisis on their respective economies. In US, UK etc there is simply an overdose and I keep getting reports etc from Australia, NZ, Canada etc.

This inspired me to just do some search on the research done by Indian counterparts. I checked websites of India’s ivy leagues, Economics Schools and thinktanks and was not very pleased.

Thinktanks – I checked working paper sections of leading thinktanks like ICRIER, NIPFP, NCAER etc. But did not find any research on ongoing crisis except at ICRIER.  Then I saw the seminars, conferences etc conducted by these thinktanks and see some seminars etc being conducted on the crisis.  But again we hardly get transcripts, etc of the seminars. NIPFP has a program with DEA which has some good papers and discussions.  But most of these papers are written by common economists and you usually get a one dimension view. At some places we do not get proper hyperlinks etc etc. I also saw researchers webpages at these thinktanks and find hardly anyone providing links to their papers/publications.

Ivy Leagues: The biggest disappointment comes from Indian Ivy Leagues. See the working paper section at IIM-A, IIM-B, IIM-C, IIM-L (no link), IIM-I (not updated), IIM-K (no links to studies) etc.   True, they are business schools and not really eco schools. But some research/policy brief can be given??  Even here, the Profs hardly provide links to their papers. What is worse is some don’t mention their research at all. I also checked the various seminars/conferences being held and we hardly get the papers etc presented.

Eco Schools: I checked DSE, MSE (a good website), JNU, IGIDR and everywhere the story seems to be the same. No research on current economic environment at all! Even here the most faculties do not link their papers at all. IGIDR has an annual conference where some research on the crisis was done.

I found all this quite strange. I had started the exercise to get some ideas on Indian economy/business firms/financial markets etc but there is hardly anything. Most of the research being done is also quite exotic which I did not really understand. The research which looked interesting to me hardly has any links. The thinktanks are doing a much better job and if you dont see much research on current crisis, you do see some research on other issues as well.

I would reiterate to India’s  Ivy leagues to shore up their research. The quality of research needs a serious makeover.