Globalization and the Indian Experience

April 24, 2017

Columbia Global Centers | Mumbai partnered with the Committee on Global Thought on a project intended to discuss pressing issues affecting globalization in the world today and to do so in conversation with colleagues in different parts of the world in academia, government, business, journalism, and civil society. The Mumbai component of this Global Think-In, organized on April 24, 2017, took the form of a virtual video conversation among experts from India and the Columbia University campus. Similar conversations were held at the Global Centers in Beijing, Istanbul, Amman, Tunis, Nairobi, Paris, Rio, and Santiago. 

Indian discussants navigated across a host of global challenges and their implications to the region. Manjeet Kripalani, co-founder and Executive Director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, shared her perspective on the digitization of the economy and the virtue of low-cost technology in countries like India versus the global penchant for financialization. Lakshmi Lingam, Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, dwelled on the question of gender inequality in a dynamic globalized world. Govindraj Ethiraj, a television & print journalist and founder of India Spend, an online data journalism initiative, shared his insights on the implications of living in a post-truth world and the emergence of fake news as a global phenomenon.     

They were joined at the Columbia University end by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Anla Cheng, a Senior Partner of Sino-Century, Bernard Harcourt, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and Sharon Marcus, the Dean of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The session raised questions about the need for newer socioeconomic models to deal with the changing global order.