Day 2 of the Conference
The second day of the Eighth Annual International Conference on Public Policy and Management and the Second Policy Hackathon witnessed 23 teams presenting specific policy issue talks on health, education, sanitation, poverty and a range of other domains on August 14, 2013.
The Evaluation team for the competition comprised Varsha Joshi, Director, Census Operations, Registrar General of India; Sridhar Pabbisetty, Consultant, Government of Karnataka; Hema Swaminathan, Assistant Professor, Centre for Public Policy, IIMB; and Arnab Mukherji, Assistant Professor, Centre for Public Policy, IIMB.
Vipul Mathur, Ramprasad Alva, Avadhooth Jathar and Purnima Prakash from Team Cloud won the Hackathon by showcasing how the government's electrification program had a crowding-in effect of personal expenditure on education (tuition, books, newspapers, etc.). They opined that such a synergy between two seemingly orthogonal policy areas, namely electrification and education, can have broader implications for effective policy execution.
Teams A2H, SSF, and Ideators won the Second Runner-Up Award. Ankur, Hridayesh Vishwakarma, CA Khalilullah and Abhijit R Rao, of A2H Hackers, showed that the data distributed during the competition had certain flaws that could lead to errors in analysis.
Dr Shankara Prasad and Pradeep V Pydah, from Team SSF, looked at disparities in assets and access to sanitation and argued for a case of community toilets.
Aashish Dattani, Dheeraj Kumar and Yeshwanth Gurukar of Team Ideators discussed the potential of using NREGA to improve rural toilet infrastructure.
The participants - using district-level data - established the need for policy interventions and showed the value of specific types of interventions.
Day 1 of the Conference
The Centre for Public Policy (CPP), Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, will host its Eighth Annual International Conference on Public Policy and Management from August 12-14, 2013 and the Second Policy Hackathon on August 10-11, 2013.
Themed 'Infrastructure: Hard and Soft', the conference this year will see over 95 papers being presented by academicians, policy makers, bureaucrats, NGOs, members of parliaments, etc., from across India and the US, Britain, Europe, Africa, Afghanistan and Iran. In addition to this, there will four round-table discussions.
Creation of a world-class infrastructure is a key priority and a necessary condition for sustaining growth in the economy, and occupies an important space in the public policy debate today. Hard infrastructure refers to the physical components that support our society, such as transport, power, communication, land, ports, bridges, etc. Soft infrastructure includes information infrastructure, rules and regulations governing various systems, service delivery and institutions required for human development.
Eminent scholars will dwell on a wide range of issues such as: India vs China comparison in infrastructure progress, the policy implications of cybercrime and cybersecurity in India, the technological advances affecting the IT services trade, the challenges of implementing India's national e-governance plan, urban transport, water issues and even the "epidemic" of sexual violence in Delhi's public spaces under various conference tracks, including Gender and Infrastructure, Financing Infrastructure, Shaping New Cities, Urban Governance, Information and Communication Technologies, Development and Trade.
"The Public Policy conference of IIM Bangalore has emerged as a key engagement of academicians and practitioners in India and beyond annually. Over years it has grown in intensity and visibility among researchers. It is a forum which brings together the academicians and policy makers, and has helped identify several research areas and bring out debates on several current policy issues. The Center for Public Policy sees this Conference as a key component of its strategy to encourage policy research and engage with government," says Professor G Ramesh, Chairperson, Center for Public Policy.
"This year we have a number of tracks on key emerging themes in public policy in India. The Nirbhaya rape case raises issues about how we design public infrastructure for women and we raise this issue under the Gender and Infrastructure track organized by Dr. Shreyasi Jha and Dr. Subhalakshmi Nandi from UN Women," says Prof. Arnab Mukherji, Organiser of the Policy Hackathon and the Conference.
"Ramana Tadepalli at the Century Real Estate Research Initiative, IIMB, has organised a track on managing Affordable Housing in India. A third track seeks to explore the use of IT for Public Policy in India and brings together work on tax reforms, administrative changes and ICT initiatives in public sector. Other emerging policy relevant work on Environmental Fiscal Reforms, organized by Dr. Ashish Chaturvedi, GIZ, and IIMB, or Shaping India's Cities provide thoughts on important changes that urban cities need to think about. K Jairaj will engage a number of speakers under the broad theme of Governance at the Crossroads," Prof. Mukherji adds.
Second Policy Hackathon, IIMB
Twenty-three teams participated in the Second Policy Hackatho. "Using the analysis opportunities in Public Policy created by large micro-data on different dimensions of India we invited interested folks to explore and produce persuasive arguments for social policy reform in India. The goal is to form teams that use a focused 24-hour period in which they use a large nationally representative dataset to discuss key concerns in a public policy domain such as health policy, education policy, infrastructure problems, or with employment issues. We expect team participation wherein the team consists of individuals (and not computers) who can write, code, and design simple analytic plans to convince readers about how certain changes may alleviate currently standing policy issues. We expect the ideal team to be a healthy mix of skill sets in social sciences, technology and management domains. After participating in the Hackathon the 10th - 11th of August, the top 5 teams will present their work in the conference on the 13th and winners will be announced on August 14th," explains Prof. Mukherji.
On August 13, the CPP will host 'Gender Narratives from Kampala, Kabul and Bengaluru', an informal evening of conversations on global perspectives on gender issues with women members of parliament and government from Uganda and Afghanistan, UN Women India, women's organisations and academicians.
VENUE: IIMB Campus.
IN BRIEF:
August 12 -14: Eighth Annual International Conference on Public Policy and Management, Infrastructure: Hard and Soft.
August 10 and 11: Policy Hackathon.
August 13 (Evening): Gender Narratives from Kampala, Kabul and Bangalore, organised by UNWomen and IIMB.
Venue: IIMB Campus.
August 12: Chief Guest: August 13: Chief Guest: Gita Sen, Professor, IIMB
August 14: Valedictory, Rahul De, Professor, IIMB