Think tanks: India

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This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.

2016: International institutions arrive

The Times of India, Jan 17 2016

Indrani Bagchi

`Outside ideas' trickle in as think tanks set up base

With top US think tanks setting up offices in India, the Indian marketplace for ideas is beginning to buzz

Carnegie En dowment announced it would be opening its India office. It will follow Brookings Institution which has been around for a couple of years now. As policy-making and the international context evolves rapidly, the hope is that these outside “inputs“ would help to create more “informed“ decisions by government.

These think tanks are coming into India at a time when there is a flowering of research organisations here.The government, for long operating with brahminical inscrutability, is more welcoming of ideas, inputs and research from outside. C Raja Mohan, founder-di rector of Carnegie's India office, said he envisages a triad of sectors which will benefit from the think tank ­ “foreign policy and security , politics of India's economic reforms and the rapidly developing technology policymaking space.“

Indian think tanks too are evolving rapidly . The best known, Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and Centre for Policy Research (CPR) will inundate your inbox, and have increased their government footprint in recent years. Their playing fields mostly remain in the realm of foreign and security policy with a clutch of former diplomats and military officers taking the lead in the ideas and opinions bazaar. There are also a growing number of organizations, like the MEA-MOD sponsored IDSA and ICWA, working closely with the government in its public diplomacy outreach. But this year MEA is working with ORF to execute one of its three flagship events ­ the Raisina Dialogues in spring, and with Mumbai-based Gateway House for the Gateway of India Dialogues on geo-strategic and geo-economic issues respectively.

Samir Saran of ORF said the Raisina Dialogues this year would feature about 100 speakers from 30 countries.ORF has also got into the pleasurable business of Track 1.5 dialogues with France, Australia, BRICS and now Egypt.The frontrunner in this area is the Ananta Aspen Centre which has been running the longest and possibly most influential dialogues with US, China, Israel and Turkey , Singapore and Bhutan and an India-Japan-US trilateral, which paved the way for the official dialogue that started a few years later.

The government used think tanks extensively during climate change negotiations, where, the space is filled by specialised organizations like CEEW, CSE and TERI.

How does the government evaluate the inputs from think tanks? The foreign ministry is the biggest consumer of these ideas from `outside'.In the last year, foreign secretary S Jaishankar has placed additional responsibility on a virtually defunct Policy Planning division. The ministry has broken new ground by hiring consultants not employed by the government.But in the new atmosphere of the state interacting with think tanks, the experience for government has not been one of unalloyed satisfaction.