Professor Sital Kalantry presents at a national seminar on violence against women organized by the Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network.
Business, Economics, Law, and Policy
Current Programs and Partnerships
The Center will support and augment a variety of research collaborations already underway. Chicago Booth faculty have undertaken recent studies on the effects of affirmative action and on gender and health issues in India. Partnering with the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, Chicago Booth offers an International Business Exchange Program for MBA candidates interested in gaining international perspectives in India.
In 2013, while on leave from Chicago Booth and serving as the Indian government's chief economic advisor, Professor Raghuram Rajan was named Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. From 2008 - 2012, he was an honorary economic adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh while continuing to teach finance and conduct research at Chicago Booth full time.
Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, has a longstanding connection with India, including an appointment as a visiting professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University and work on gender equality and law with the Lawyer’s Collective in Delhi. Students at the University of Chicago Law School travelled to Jammu in 2011 to gain hands-on experience in the human rights world, investigating the ongoing plight of the Kashmiri Pandit migrants, with assistance from students at the University of Jammu who volunteered as translators.
Researchers at the Computation Institute—a joint initiative of UChicago and Argonne National Laboratory—are working on The Enterprise Initiative to assemble economic data from India, Thailand, and Mexico to model the impact of alternative policies.
Students from the International Human Rights Clinic led by UChicago Professor Sital Kalantry in partnership with Jindal Global Law School, conducted comparative research on sexual violence laws in India. Their research included, among other things, interviews with sex workers in Kolkata, India, a group likely to be affected by changes in existing laws on sexual violence. The students travelled to New Delhi, India in March 2013 to present the findings of their research in a national seminar on violence against women organized by the Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network.
The Harris School of Public Policy offers multiple courses related to policy issues in India today. Students in the Chicago Harris International Policy Practicum traveled to India in 2005 to meet with government, NGO, and business leaders to develop policy recommendations for economic liberalization in India. Students returned to the subcontinent in 2012 to study India’s fight against tuberculosis.
Campus Connections
Many opportunities exist for Indian scholars to study, research and teach in Chicago.
The Law School’s Center for Comparative Constitutionalism has sponsored numerous conferences focused on India to examine topics like legal outsourcing, personal laws and equality, and religious violence.
The Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago is an intellectual destination for top economists and scholars around the globe. The Institute recently hosted a conference featuring a paper called “Does Management Matter: Evidence from India,” which examined data collected from a field experiment on large Indian textile firms to evaluate the causal impact of modernizing their management practices.