Kautilya, Daksh collaborate to improve policy making in India

Kautilya will build key leadership capabilities required to tackle complex challenges, support research and awareness activities to promote accountability and better governance.

Hyderabad: Hyderabad-based Kautilya School of Public Policy signed a five-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Bengaluru-based Daksh Society. They will conduct mutually supportive non-partisan and interdisciplinary research to improve the judicial and governance system in India.

Kautilya will build key leadership capabilities required to tackle complex challenges, support research and awareness activities to promote accountability and better governance. It will identify and assign students to contribute to critical interventions in the areas of judicial and governance reforms.

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Kautilya will help Daksh’s work through dedicated research towards creating inclusive, transparent and self-correcting mechanisms that can be encouraged in all the departments of governments. Daksh will support internships and capstone projects.

“There is a need for innovation to bring in reforms for policy making in this country. So, to facilitate that, students should be empowered with enough tools and awareness. In the first year, we will contextualise what Daksh has done and bring that into our curriculum. We also want to do something for mid-career practitioners going forward, in the form of executive programmes,” Sridhar Pabbisetty, founding director of Kautilya School of Public Policy, told Telangana Today.

Harish Narasappa, co-founder, Daksh Society said, “We have over the years created a large database on the judicial sector. We have been deeply involved in studying the processes in the judiciary system of India from a citizen’s perspective. We are trying to enter into different MoUs with different institutions in the country. We have recently partnered with IIT-Delhi to look at technology and law. We are partnering with law schools, technology, management and public policy schools.”

Daksh embarked on the Rule of Law Project in 2014 to evaluate judicial performance, particularly to study the problem of pendency of cases in the Indian legal system. The team is making efforts to measure the life cycle of the cases and evaluate the judiciary time spent on them, to see if better scheduling of cases and use of technology can bring in some improvement.

Kautilya is going to roll out its Master’s in Public Policy programme in July and Daksh is going to contribute through subject matter experts in the form of faculty as well as knowledge base on case progressions and outcomes, in the form of case studies. Evidence-based research will be one of the prime areas of both the partners. “Kautilya and Daksh will symbiotically merge the data platforms for students to have access to learning,” added Pabbisetty.

Narasappa added, “We believe that the judiciary system has to keep pace with emerging trends and challenges to handle new age issues such as the e-commerce litigation and cyber security cases. Another challenge that the system continues to face is that of multiple appeals in the courts.”

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