| Ideas and Institutions of Welfare in India: A comparative and research-driven analysis

The elective is designed primarily for students in the B.A., LL.B, MPP, LL.B and LL.M programmes.  All students interested in the course will have to submit a Statement of Purpose and a research paper that they have worked on earlier which will be vetted to ensure that they are a good fit for the course. This is a demanding course and is meant for those who seek to write a publishable piece by the end of the course on an important and topical subject area.  The selection process for this elective is, accordingly, designed by keeping this overall purpose in mind.

This is a course that seeks to provide students with an overview of Welfare in India, while simultaneously requiring them to conduct in-depth research on aspects of (typically) a specific welfare programme. The main goal is to provide both an overall perspective and a rich, contextual understanding that is self-driven and self-selected, with supervision from the course instructor. The first objective will be achieved through background mini-lectures and seminar-style discussions of the main readings of the course.  The second objective will be pursued by encouraging students, very early on in the course, to choose the specific welfare rights regime/issue they are interested in, and to conduct their own research on that issue as they track the overall evolution of the course in the regular classes.