‘Know Your Regulator’ Finale and Release of an e-Handbook with Ideas for Regulatory Reform
The State Capacity Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) is pleased to invite you to the final talk in the ‘Know Your Regulator’ talk series and the release of an e-handbook with ideas for reforming regulatory governance in India.
In Conversation:
Dr MS Sahoo, Distinguished Professor, National Law University, Delhi
Dr Devesh Kapur, Senior Visiting Fellow, CPR and Professor, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Dr KP Krishnan, Honorary Research Professor, CPR
Dr Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Senior Fellow, CPR and Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University
Welcome and Introductory Remarks:
Ms Yamini Aiyar, President and CEO, CPR
Friday, 31 March 2023, 5.30 PM to 7.00 PM IST
The event will be held in hybrid mode – at the CPR office (Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi) and over Zoom.
About the Talk
In the finale to the KYR series, Dr MS Sahoo and Dr Devesh Kapur will join Dr KP Krishnan and Dr Mekhala Krishnamurthy to discuss the future of regulatory governance in India. On this occasion, we will also release a compilation of key learnings from the series and our ongoing work in the field of regulatory design and capacity. As part of this series, we spoke to chairpersons of nine Indian statutory regulatory authorities (“SRA”) overseeing distinct sectors such as insolvency and bankruptcy, food safety, real estate, electricity, water, pensions, and insurance. In the tenth and final talk in this series, we reflect on questions of design, autonomy and capacity of SRAs, and allied approaches towards building relevant and capable regulatory institutions in the future.
About the Know Your Regulator series
In this series we have spoken to the people entrusted with the task of regulating Indian markets and various parts and aspects of the economy. These are the chairpersons and members of India’s regulatory agencies. In our conversations we will seek to explore the public nature of regulatory activity. In other words, why should the work of regulatory agencies be of interest to people, as producers, consumers, professionals, service providers, and as citizens? What are the public goals of regulation? In what ways does the work of regulation involve having to make a balance, or to make trade-offs, or to amicably resolve competing or even conflicting claims of public and private interest?
Regulatory agencies are a relatively recent innovation of the Indian state, set up to address the evolving needs of the Indian economy in the decades since the 1990s (although with some notable older instances). We were interested in exploring the institutional form of the regulatory agencies, their features, norms and values, and their frameworks of decision-making and rationality. We were also interested in the functional domain and the everyday administration of the regulatory agencies, their staffing, procedures, information systems and operational modalities.
Regulatory agencies are envisaged as a state agency that can respond to complex and changing situations, both at the level of policy recommendation and in case-specific ruling. In the conception of regulatory agencies, this was thought of as a challenge that would be addressed through specialisation, expertise and in the design of their power and functions. However, each regulatory agency is also unique, in terms of the way in which its regulatory mandate is designed and the nature of the challenges that it is set up to address. In our conversations with the regulators, we sought to explore the regulatory debates (both broad and sectoral) that animate their world, and how it relates to the rest of us.
Click here to register for Zoom.
Click here to attend in-person.
Find the e-handbook pdf here.
