Every new cohort of fellows and interns asks the same question in their first week: what should I read? There is no single answer, but here are five books that have repaid the time of many people starting out. They disagree with each other in useful ways.
1. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013). A sustained argument that India’s growth has not been matched by progress in health, education and public services, with frequent reference to Kerala’s experience.
2. Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav (eds.), Rethinking Public Institutions in India (2017). Essays on the institutions that actually run the country, from the Election Commission to the civil services. Essential for understanding why good policies often fail in implementation.
3. Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-Being: How Kerala Became ‘a Model’ (1992). A historian’s account of how social movements, politics and the position of women shaped Kerala’s distinctive development.
4. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics (2011). A readable introduction to evidence based thinking about poverty, and to the careful testing of policy ideas.
5. Y. V. Reddy and G. R. Reddy, Indian Fiscal Federalism (2019). A clear guide to how money flows between the Union and the states, by authors with long experience of the system.
Read them with a pencil. Note where you disagree, and why. The habit of arguing with what you read is the most useful thing a reading list can teach.
[Placeholder publication. Replace or update the list as you wish.]