PROFILE
Shankkar Aiyar
Shankkar Aiyar is a prominent India-based political economy analyst, columnist and author.
His path-breaking book Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change fetched him national acclaim as a public intellectual. Accidental India, an in-depth study of the political and economic history of modern India, examines the country’s transformation through the arresting angles of seven game changers. The book argues and establishes that the turning points in the country’s history were not the result of foresight or planning but serendipitous consequences of major crises that had to be resolved at any cost.
Aiyar’s second book Aadhaar – A Biometric History of India’s 12 Digit Revolution, published by Westland Amazon in 2017, chronicles the setting up of the world’s largest biometric identity platform which serves as the foundation of India’s digital governance infrastructure. Released by the President of India and received by the Prime Minister of India, Aadhaar-A Biometric History is an unusual dramatisation of contemporary history, of the political and economic changes, has been published and is globally available in five languages.
His third book, The Gated Republic – India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions, published by Harper Collins in June 2020, analyses and documents the stark failure of the state in the provision of the most basic of services - water, power, health, education and security. This enquiry into the anatomy of state failure has received acclaim across domains - policy makers, politicos and academics.
Aiyar specialises in the interface of economics and politics in the process of change. He has covered every election since 1984 and the political economy since 1991. A journalist for over three decades – his 1991 scoop on a bankrupt India pledging its gold reserves made national headlines – he has won awards and been at the helm of a national newspaper and newsweekly. Aiyar, 59, has authored a study on India’s Socio-Economic Fault Lines and its 100 worst districts. His investigation on 25 years of political corruption, Smoking Guns, is part of an anthology. He has been a Wolfson Chevening Fellow at Cambridge University where he studied the Lifecycles of Emerging Economies.
Aiyar decodes the impact of politics on economics for Indian and international audiences at global conferences and on media platforms. He is Visiting Faculty at BITSoM in Mumbai where he teaches politiconomics to MBA students. He is currently researching the triad of disruptions triggered by demographic, technological and climate change.
