Feroze Varun Gandhi delivered a lecture at IIM Ahmedabad, at an event organised by the Public Policy Students Club of the institute. The lecture was attended by around 100 people, including students from the PGPM, Food and Agribusiness Management (FABM) and Armed Forces Programmes, besides staff and some faculty members.
Gandhi is a Member of Parliament and has been lecturing at leading universities and policy thinktanks and civil society organisations across India for a while now. At the session in IIM-A, he released his new book A Rural Manifesto: Realising India’s Future Through her Villages . The talk was an interesting peek into Gandhi’s 2.5 years of research that goes behind the book, fondly referred to as “the unreadably dense volume” by the author. He gave succinct examples from his experiences, both urban and rural, to highlight the inequalities prevalent in the Indian society currently.
He discussed how ‘privilege perpetuates privilege’ and how technology has the potential to act as an equaliser, if used well. He spoke in detail about possible political reforms that would help strengthen India’s democratic governance, such as parliamentary addressal of public petitions, need for addressing electoral corruption and strengthening the parliamentary discussion process on passing laws. Among other things, he also talked about grassroot innovations in the rural economy.