This June, we launched the 18th edition of our flagship summer internship program, the Researching Reality Internship. The annual six-week research internship engages college and university students in critical learning, primary research and policy analysis, leading to a publication of original research papers addressing key governance concerns and policy frameworks.
In this edition, we have a cohort of 22 young learners, researching the complex regulations and policy bottlenecks that continue to thwart enterprise in India.
Theme and Sub-Themes: Taking note of the complex regulations that govern businesses in India, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 2014 prepared a 98-point action plan in 2014 called the Business Reform Action Plan (BRAP) to ease the business regulatory environment across states. The internship will address the implementation of the ease of doing business reforms in the state of Delhi with a particular focus on: (a) the progress on the ease of doing business reforms, (b) the need for and scope of regulatory reforms in the services sector. The research will also incorporate an exploratory study on the emergence of service aggregators (such as Uber, Zomato) and document the regulatory shifts and learnings, if any, in and for the industries they operate in.
Under the guidance of Research Advisor Bhuvana Anand, the interns will delve deeper into understanding the true challenges that restrictive regulations pose to businesses through quantitative and qualitative research, data analysis, and critical thinking. The interns have undergone dedicated sessions on 'Ease of Doing Business in India', 'Economic Development and Poverty', 'Property Rights', 'Public Choice', 'Spontaneous Order and Prices', 'Policy Evaluation and Methods' and many more by sectoral experts like Parth Shah, Founder President of Centre for Civil Society; Luis Miranda, President, Centre for Civil Society; Barun Mitra, Founder and Director of the Liberty Institute; and Shagata Mukherjee, Professor, Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics, among others.