Reimagining Public Policy Studies in India

Public Policy is a nascent discipline in India. While it has thrived for some time in Western academia, it has only recently begun to proliferate as a stand-alone area of study in Indian universities and social science research.

Early public policy departments were set up in the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) such as IIM Calcutta and IIM Bangalore that launched postgra­duate programmes in public policy and management a few decades ago. In recent years, there has been a rising interest in Master of Public Policy (MPP) programmes, now offered by institutions as varied as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), IIMs, autonomous universities, (applied) social science institutes, law schools, state universities, as well as stand-alone colleges. In my estimate, there are more than 20 MPP programmes running right now in the country, most of them having started in the last five to seven years.