The programme takes as its point of departure A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, the Financial Times Book of the Year for 2025, co-authored by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. Over five days at the Jindal campus, the two authors will deliver ten lectures tracing India’s development path from the founding of the republic to the present, covering state-building, growth, nation-building, and the pathologies that continue to shape policy choices today. Each morning’s lectures are followed by an afternoon workshop, led by the authors and by a set of policy researchers and practitioners, in which participants engage directly with data, empirical methods, and, where relevant, AI tools.

The workshop is not conceived as a passive lecture series. Its ambition is threefold: to deepen participants’ understanding of the Indian economy as a connected whole rather than a set of isolated topics, to strengthen how that economy is taught in university classrooms, and to seed new research by exposing participants to primary data sources and the analytical tools now available to work with them.

Over five days, participants will accumulate 30 hours of direct interaction with the resource persons, earning the equivalent of two academic credits for those enrolled in degree programmes. Enrolment is capped at 100, selected through a competitive process from among undergraduate and graduate students and university faculty across India.

• Develop a systematic understanding of the trajectory of the Indian economy since independence, from the initial conditions of the 1950s to the challenges of the present.
• Engage directly with the empirical and conceptual apparatus set out in A Sixth of Humanity, including its treatment of state-building, growth, and nation-building as interlinked rather than separate processes.
• Acquire working fluency in the principal Indian statistical sources, including what they measure well and where they mislead.
• Learn how AI tools can be used responsibly in economic research and incorporated into university teaching.
• Initiate original research on a specific issue in the Indian economy, carried forward from the application essay into further work after the workshop.

The workshop follows a simple structure, repeated each day across five days. Two lectures, each two hours long, are delivered every morning by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian, moving sequentially through the arguments of A Sixth of Humanity: state-building, growth, nation-building, and the pathologies that now confront Indian policy. A two-hour workshop follows in the afternoon, led on different days by the authors and by other resource persons, including policy researchers and practitioners, covering topics ranging from the data resources available for analysing the Indian economy to the use of AI in research and pedagogy.

Over the five days, this amounts to 30 hours of live interaction with the resource persons. The intent is that the lectures and workshops reinforce one another: the mornings build the argument, the afternoons show how it is built.

JSGP is one of twelve schools at O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana, an institution designated an Institute of Eminence by the Government of India. Established in 2012, JSGP has pioneered public policy and economics education in India, offering undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programmes across public policy, economics, and governance. The school engages with the contemporary policy environment through interdisciplinary studies, teaching, and research, and works to develop a comparative perspective on local and global policy issues.