CASI-Piramal Foundation interns blog from India

The Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania is funding four undergraduate Penn students this year for an eight-week summer internship with the Grassroots Development Laboratory, run by the Piramal Foundation, In Bagar, Rajasthan.
Penn students Katherine A. Maughan, Kumari Pooja, Rahul B. Reddy and Stephanie Searles are blogging about their their work and life in India. Read snapshots of their experiences in Rajasthan at penninbagar.blogspot.com

Falling Through the Cracks: India's Failing Infrastructure Policy

Partha Mukhopadhyay

05.19.2008

In its embrace of public private partnerships to cut costs and increase revenue in the infrastructure sector, the Indian government has lost sight of its core objective to provide better services to the people, points out Partha Muklhopadhyay, Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

In Memoriam: Professor Robert F. Goheen (1919-2008)

It is with a profound sense of loss that we note the passing of Professor Robert F. Goheen, President Emeritus of Princeton University, and the Chairman Emeritus of CASI’s International Advisory Board (IAB), on March 31, 2008. He was 88.

Prof. Goheen was born in India and raised there until he was 15. He returned to serve as the United States’s ambassador to India from 1977 to 1980.

He was closely associated with the Center for the Advanced Study of India as Chairman of the Center’s IAB (1993-2004) when the Center was trying to realize its vision as the first world class research institution on contemporary India in the United States.

CASI announces winners of Summer 2008 Travel Funds Competition!

We are pleased to announce the winners, selected from an extremely competitive pool of applicants, of the CASI Summer 2008 Travel Funds Competition.

CASI: Enriching Research and Debate on Contemporary India

The Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) was born a year after India launched its historic economic reforms. Founded in 1992 by Prof. Francine Frankel as the first – and even now, only – academic research center in the United States for the study of contemporary India, CASI is today recognized as a national resource, addressing the urgent need for objective knowledge of India’s rapidly changing society, politics and economy, and the forces and processes behind them.

Now under the direction of Prof. Devesh Kapur, the Center further expands the University of Pennsylvania’s leadership on South Asian studies through its research focus on India’s economic transition, governance and politics, security and foreign policy, human capital, and media.

The Center’s key goals are to nurture a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars, and to provide a forum for public dialogue among the academic, business, and foreign policy communities. At CASI, our newly endowed Nand and Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series brings leading India experts to the Penn campus. We anticipate this public program will extend the dialogue on India across the University, and in the greater Philadelphia community.

As part of our commitment to young scholars and future leaders, CASI offers year-round opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students through paid research for the Center during the academic year and the Summer Study and Internship Travel Program for undergraduates to India. Our Visiting Scholars Program allows Penn students to interact directly with academics, policymakers, and NGO leaders from India who are in residence at CASI during a semester.

To reach a larger audience, the Center has an online publication – India in Transition – a forum for the exchange of the most innovative ideas and analyses about India today. These articles also run on the op-ed pages of the 10-million readership Hindi newspaper, Hindustan.

Our vision for the Center is to evolve and grow organically as an international hub for policy-relevant research on India, and to strengthen ties within and beyond the Penn network. Collaboration with our New Delhi counterpart research organization, University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI), widens CASI’s
reach within India.

The University of Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of area studies since 1942 when Prof. W. Norman Brown pioneered the study of modern India, a full fifteen years before area studies appeared on any other US campus. That legacy continues at the School of Arts and Sciences through the Department of South Asian Studies and its South Asia Center, the stellar holdings of the South Asian Studies Collection at the Van Pelt Library, and most vibrantly, we believe, through CASI.