Devesh Kapur

Devesh Kapur was appointed Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India in 2006. He is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and holds the Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to arriving at Penn, Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, namely India. His recent book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India, was published by Princeton University Press in August 2010, and earned him the 2012 ENMISA (Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of International Studies Association) Distinguished Book Award. Kapur is the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize awarded to the best junior faculty, Harvard College, in 2005.
India: A Property Tax Proposal

India: A Property Tax Proposal

March 31, 2014

Why taxing property for accountable local government in India is essential.  In our last piece, we had argued that taxation is the economic glue that binds citizens to the state in a necessary two-way relationship. A citizen's stake in exercising accountability diminishes if he or she does not pay in a visible...

India: Taxation's Fatal Neglect?

India: Taxation's Fatal Neglect?

February 03, 2014

Obsessed with spending, India's UPA has ignored the vital task of expanding the direct tax net. How one-sided has India's conversation on its government finances become. It is all about spending, spending, spending. For the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, of course, elevated spending, subsidies and redistribution were sacred objectives. But...