In this Tiffin Talk Mr Harsh Shrivastava will present his understanding of how the Victorian Government and its departments are organised to communicate laws, rules, regulations and policies to its citizens. He will explain the process of government communication in Victoria and will contrast it with how India’s federal and state governments organise themselves to communicate laws. Mr Shrivastava will give his opinion on the status quo and some suggestions as to how it could potentially be improved in Victoria and in India.

Mr Harsh Shrivastava, who is presently an Emerging Leader Fellow at the Australia India Institute, is a policy expert who combines a background in politics, business and the media. Currently, he is consulting with India’s Planning Commission on the process of making the 12th Plan. He has worked as Prime Minister Vajpayee’s deputy-speechwriter; managed the BJP’s website; worked for the Confederation of Indian Industry; has been the marketing head of an infrastructure services company; a journalist and written India’s first book on CSR. Mr Shrivastava has an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad, India’s top-ranked B-school.

Ready or not, here we come! Indian higher education and international collaborations

by Radhika Gorur

Date: Friday 18 May 2012 – 5:00-6.15pm
Location: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts, The University of Melbourne

It is not overstating the case to say that Indian higher education is in crisis. Demand far exceeds supply, corruption is rampant and inequity is endemic. Excellence is limited to a few institutions which are by far the exception rather than the rule.

But higher education is finally beginning to receive serious policy attention in India, with many reforms being planned. The challenge of change is complicated by shifts globally in the very nature of knowledge production, mobilisation, circulation and consumption. Collaborations are turning higher education institutions into international, networked, multi-sited organisations.  Although key legislations and important policy decisions to regulate collaboration are still awaited, India is already a sought after destination for ‘educational exports’, and a number of collaborations are already under way.

In this presentation, Radhika explores some of the challenges that confront collaborations between Indian and overseas institutions of higher education, and speculates on the conditions that may facilitate meaningful and sustainable collaborations.

Dr Radhika Gorur is a Research Fellow at the Victoria Institute for Education, Diversity and Lifelong Learning. Her research in education policy has sought, broadly, to understand how some policy ideas begin to cohere, stabilise, gain momentum and make their way in the world. Her recent projects, in association with Prof Fazal Rizvi, have focused on transnational collaborations in higher education. Radhika’s current preoccupation is with the production of accounts of equity in education, particularly in international comparisons.

Dinner: The seminar will be followed by dinner at around 7 pm at a nearby restaurant within walking distance of Melbourne University. All are welcome!

Email list: To be included on the Melbourne South Asian Study Group emailing list, please contact Michelle Hannah on m.hannah2@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

In this Tiffin Talk Ms Lalthanchami Sailo will relate her experiences as a visiting Endeavour Executive Award fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Ms Sailo’s Australian experience will simultaneously be interwoven with her life at Mizoram University, located in the North East corner of India. Mizrom University is aiming to carve out a reputation both in the national and international arenas. Ms Sailo will deliberate on the achievements and future aspirations of Mizoram University and will also outline the major hurdles facing the institution in this regard.

Ms Lalthanchami Sailo is the Deputy Registrar at Mizoram University. She has had 20 years of administrative experience at UNICEF, Mizoram State Government and currently at Mizoram University. The different positions she has held have given her in-depth experience and expertise in Government and University systems. She is also involved with activities designed to improve the lives of the rural population and in particular the social and economic welfare of women. Ms Sailo has a Masters degree in Public Administration and is completing her PhD at Mizoram University. The Australian Government had selected Ms Sailo to receive the 2012 Endeavour Executive Award.

Date: Friday 20 April 2012 – 5:00-6.15pm
Location: Graduate Seminar Room 2, Old Arts, The University of Melbourne

A landmark judgement of the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality in India in July 2009. Introduced during British colonial rule, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalized all sexual activity that was deemed ‘against the order of nature’. Although few cases were prosecuted under this legislation, its existence on the books rendered lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in India vulnerable to blackmail, harassment and violence. This seminar presentation will review the two decades of activism that led to the repeal of Section 377, and analyses the reasons for this success. The presentation raises questions about whether legal success can transform the ground realities of discrimination and violence faced by LGBT people in India, and concludes with reflections on the possible future political pathways of the LGBT movement in India.

Dr Bina Fernandez is a lecturer in Development Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. She has previously taught development studies at the University of Leeds, UK, the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and the Universities of Oxford and Oxford-Brookes. Bina’s doctoral degree at the University of Oxford was completed in 2008, and focuses on the construction of a new feminist framework for the analysis of policy in developing countries. Bina also has considerable professional experience as a development practitioner, obtained through eight years of working with rural development and human rights NGOs in India, in addition to research and evaluation consultancies with international NGOs.

Dinner: The seminar will be followed by dinner at around 7 pm at a nearby restaurant within walking distance of Melbourne University. All are welcome.

Email list: To be included on the Melbourne South Asian Study Group emailing list, please contact Michelle Hannah on m.hannah2@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

The Australia India Institute in association with the Consulate General of India, Melbourne are pleased to invite you to the launch of Tagore and the Romance of Travel Exhibition.

The exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of  the birth of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore and is an initiative of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations. The exhibition has been shown in Malaysia, Thailand, China and Singapore.

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore was a writer and artist of prodigious talent and output and his works included novels, stories, essays, paintings and drawings. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

The exhibition will be launched by Dr Subhakanta Behera, Consul General of India in Melbourne and Professor Amitabh Mattoo, Director, Australia India Institute.

Please note the exhibition is open to the public from Monday 23 April - Tuesday 24 April, 12.00 – 5.00pm.

The exhibition is generously hosted by the Victorian College of the Arts.

In this Tiffin Talk Professor Sundhya Pahuja will consider the history of contemporary international law as an important field of contestation over global inequality. Taking three central examples, Professor Pahuja will argue that the ‘universal promise’ of international law has been subsumed within a universal claim for a particular way of life by the idea of ‘development’. As the horizon of the promised transformation and concomitant equality has receded ever further, international law has legitimised an ever-increasing sphere of intervention in the Global South. The post-war wave of decolonisation ended in the creation of the developmental nation-state, the claim to permanent sovereignty over natural resources in the 1950s and 1960s was transformed into the protection of foreign investors and the promotion of the rule of international law in the early 1990s has brought about the rise of the rule of law as a development strategy in the present day.

Professor Pahuja will critically consider contemporary narratives about India’s seemingly inexorable economic rise, and the dark sides of that triumph.

Sundhya Pahuja is a Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Law and Development Research Programme at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at The University of Melbourne. Decolonising International Law was recently awarded International Legal Scholarship’s highest prize, the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit. Sundhya’s profile and list of publications is available at http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/staff/Sundhya%20Pahuja

Accountability, governance and participation are concepts that are commonly encountered in development theory and practice. This Tiffin Talk will examine attempts to promote social audit and accountability in rural India through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) which was implemented in 2006. A key feature of MGNREGA is that it recognizes employment as a legal right and is now widely acknowledged as one of the most extensive rights based social protection schemes in the world. Under MGNREGA social auditing is mandatory in order to ensure effective implementation of the scheme. Importantly it is the beneficiaries of the scheme, mainly ordinary villagers, who are required to conduct social audits. The use of social audit as an accountability tool has had mixed results across the country. This presentation, which is based upon preliminary fieldwork conducted in Karnataka in 2011, will examine some of the challenges involved in effectively implementing social audits.

Dr Salim Lakha has multidisciplinary qualifications including economics, urban studies, and anthropology. From 2001-2009 he was the Coordinator of the Development Studies Program at The University of Melbourne. He was also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (National University of Singapore) from October 2011-December 2011. Currently he is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Dr Lakha’s area of specialisation is India and his research interests include international migration; the Indian diaspora; globalization; the international division of labour; and governance, development and democratization.

Australia and India in the Asian Century

This event is by invitation only.

For more information

The Minister for Trade, the Hon Dr Craig Emerson MP delivered the Australia India Institute’s inaugural Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture on

Australia and India in the Asian Century

Read the transcript here

Ben Chifley PM

Joseph Benedict (Ben) Chifley (1885-1951), prime minister and locomotive engine driver, was born on 22 September 1885 at Bathurst, New South Wales. He was the 16th Prime Minister of Australia. He took over the Australian Labor Party leadership and Prime Ministership after the death of John Curtin in 1945. Chifley’s Labor Party went on to retain a majority in both houses of Australian Parliament at the 1946 election, before his government was defeated in the lower house at the 1949 election. The radical reforming nature of Chifley’s government was such that between 1946 and 1949, the Australian Parliament passed 299 Acts, a record up until then, well beyond Labor’s Andrew Fisher’s 113 Acts from 1910 to 1913.

Amongst the Chifley Labor Government’s legislation was the post-war immigration scheme, the establishment of Australian citizenship, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, over-viewing the foundation of airlines Qantas and TAA, improvements in social services, the creation of the Commonwealth Employment Service, the introduction of federal funds to the States for public housing construction, the establishment of a Universities Commission for the expansion of university education, the introduction of a Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and free hospital ward treatment, the reorganisation and enlargement of the CSIRO, the establishment of a civilian rehabilitation service, the founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the establishment of the Australian National University. One of the few successful referendums to modify the Australian Constitution, the 1946 Social Services referendum, took place during Chifley’s term.

The Australia India Institute decided to create a Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture, with permission from the Chifley family, as Chifley’s attitude to Asia, and in particular India, showed an opening of the Australian mind to a post-colonial Asia with new possibilities of engagement with India and the rest of Asia.

In her article in the Australian Journal of Politics and History Julie Suares from Deakin University examines the Chifley Government’s foreign policy, in particular in relation to India  and Indonesia as evidenced by Australia’s attendance at the 1947 Asian Relations Conference and the 1949 New Delhi Conference on the Indonesian-Dutch conflict. Australia’s presence at these two conferences provided Suares an ideal opportunity to examine the Chifley government’s response to the momentous changes that occurred in post-war Asia as a result of the dismantling of the European colonial world order. She concluded that there is a diversity of views amongst historians regarding the extent of the Chifley government’s engagement with post-colonial Asia. This study of the two New Delhi conferences lends weight to the view that the government’s post-war foreign policy towards Asia was radical and innovative. Although hindered by significant political constraints and the ongoing effects of Australia’s own decolonisation process, the Chifley government did understand that there was a “changed order in the world”, and that Australia shared common interests and common problems with the emerging nations of Asia.

For further information read Julie Suares article Engaging withAsia: the Chifley Government and the New Delhi Conferences of 1947 and 1949

The Hon Dr Craig Emerson MP

Craig Emerson has been the Member for Rankin since 1998. After the 2010 federal election he was appointed the Minister for Trade. Prior to that, he had portfolio responsibility for small business, competition policy, consumer affairs and deregulation. Craig holds a Bachelor of Economics (Honours) Degree from the University of Sydney, a Master of Economics Degree from the University of Sydney and a PhD in Economics from The Australian National University.

He has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at The Australian National University and has 17 publications to his name, including a book setting out a vision and plan for Australia’s future.  Since becoming a parliamentarian Craig has had more than 70 opinion pieces published in national newspapers.

Professionally, he has been Secretary of a Queensland Government Department, CEO of a Queensland Statutory Authority, Assistant Secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Economic Analyst at the United Nations. Craig was a senior policy adviser to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, former Premier Wayne Goss and earlier to Finance Minister Peter Walsh.

In addition to his more than 25 years of public policy work, Craig has successfully run his own small business. Craig’s other interests include Rugby Union and Rugby League and he still plays a few games for the Parliamentary Rugby Union Team.

The Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture will be filmed and the film, podcast and transcript will be available on the Australia India Institute website.

After the US presidential elections in November, the second biggest elections of the world in 2012 have just taken place in five states in India. 84,746,203 of the eligible 153,804,811 voters pushed a button on an electronic voting machine in these elections. The results were declared on March 6.  India’s ruling Congress Party has lost badly in these elections, despite hard campaigning by its heir apparent Rahul Gandhi.  The Congress has come forth in the elections to the biggest and most important State in India, Uttar Pradesh (2011 pop: 199.5 million).  These results will affect India’s politics and policies in many ways in the months to come.  The two national parties have done badly, but in the faraway and turbulent North Eastern state of Manipur, the Congress has won power for the third consecutive time.  And in the tourist and mining paradise of Goa, the Hindu-nationalist BJP has come to power by winning some of the votes of Catholics.  Will these results worsen the federal government’s “policy paralysis”, or will this embolden it to press on?

Mr Harsh Shrivastava, who is presently an Emerging Leader Fellow at the Australia India Institute is a policy expert, who combines a background in politics, business, and the media.  Currently, he’s consulting with India’s Planning Commission on the process of making the 12th Plan.  He’s also been Prime Minister Vajpayee’s deputy-speechwriter; managed the BJP’s website; worked for the Confederation of Indian Industry; been the marketing head of an infrastructure services company; been a journalist; and written India’s first book on CSR.  Harsh has an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad, India’s top-ranked B-school.

Mr Souresh Roy is the Research Assistant to the Director at the Australia India Institute. His areas of research include Indian politics, society and foreign policy. Souresh has a Masters in Conflict Analysis and Peacebuilding and an MPhil in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University wherein he specialised in Diplomacy and Disarmament.