Multimedia 8 of 15

Pratap Bhanu Mehta IDRC Photos: tecklesphoto.com

Listen to a clip from Mehta’s talk

Listen to Mehta's entire talk


India is experiencing great progress, but with this growth comes new challenges, says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s leading political analysts during a public talk at IDRC on October 22.

Expanding on the theme, “Precocious India: Economic Transformation and Political Conflict in Contemporary India,” Mehta explored the radical economic, social, and political changes that have revolutionized India in recent decades and argued that contentious land issues could threaten the country’s evolving democracy.

According to Mehta, “land is politically, at the moment, one of the most contentious issues in India. I think that the debate over land encapsulates a lot of the different fault lines of corruption, democratic empowerment – the enabling drivers of industrial investment in India.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta addresses the crowd

Educated at Princeton and Oxford, Mehta has taught at Harvard University and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and lectured widely around the world. He has been one of India’s most prolific media commentators on social and political affairs, and his opinions have been widely published in India and abroad.

He is President of the Centre for Policy Research, an independent, non-partisan research institute and think tank in New Delhi.

Currently, Mehta is serving his first term as a member of IDRC’s Board of Governors.

IDRC President, David Malone, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

The event was the second instalment in IDRC’s year-long series The India Lectures, which mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of IDRC’s South Asia regional office in New Delhi. As part of the series, IDRC has also hosted journalist M.J. Akbar, sinologist Alka Acharya, and eminent political scientist Rajeev Bhargava.

The lectures highlight the wealth of eminent thinkers and stimulating ideas emanating from this rising global power.

Since it was founded nearly 40 years ago, IDRC has supported research for development in India.

The opinions expressed here reflect those of the speaker alone, and not necessarily those of the International Development Research Centre.

Multimedia 8 of 15