What?
Last year at CCS Academy, we curated a platform for CCS alumni, young students and professionals to engage in themes and discussions around public policy; now popularly called Baithak: Conversations in Policy. Baithaks follow an open group discussion format where the speaker is also the moderator of the debate, the principal guide and the facilitator of free flow of information among all the participants.
Why?
The idea of Baithak is to give a platform to all CCS graduates and potential course participants to come together for a discussion on contemporary socio-cultural and economic issues in the presence of prominent voices from the liberal movement in India. Its objective is to create a knowledge ecosystem, impacting the policy space in India at large.
You will be learning from their experiences running campaigns on the ground - from street vendors, to budget private schools, to property rights for tribals, to technology freedom for farmers.
Topic: Free Trade and Protectionism
About Speakers
Vipin Veetil is an economist whose work lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, monetary theory, and agent-based modeling. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode and was previously at IIT Madras. His academic journey spans institutions like George Mason University (PhD), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Postdoc), and Erasmus University Rotterdam.
His research explores how economies evolve out of equilibrium, focusing on distributed knowledge, production networks, and the role of monetary dynamics in complex systems. He’s published both technical and conceptual work in journals such as Macroeconomic Dynamics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and The Review of Austrian Economics. Veetil is also a practitioner of computational methods in economics and teaches courses on agent-based modeling and organizational economics.
Kumar Anand is an economist and public policy professional with over 15 years of experience. He has worked on questions related to Indian Economy, Indian Economic History, and Public Policy at government and non-governmental organizations including Asianomics Limited, National Institute of Public Finance & Policy, Free A Billion, and Centre for Civil Society.
Kumar has written for numerous national and international publications including Le Point - Phebe, Asianomics, The Hindu, Rajasthan Patrika, Pragati, and Swarajya among others. Kumar has also delivered invited lectures on Public Policy at a variety of places including University of Oklahoma, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, and Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He studied economics at University of Delhi and the Gokhale Institute of Politics & Economics, Pune.
