Shruti Rajagopalan

Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward.

My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and this is the 2026 Job Market series, where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India.

I spoke with Vaibhav Rathi, who's a doctoral candidate in economics at Stockholm University.

We discussed his job market paper titled Political Influence, Bureaucratic Priorities and Capital Accumulation in India.

I want to take that question a step further because I think in India we often compare manufacturing jobs to The gig economy now, and especially the wage differentials between the two.

Five years ago, you had a podcast with Shruti Rajagopalan, uh, from Mercatus, right? And, uh, you'd said that...

You'd said a lot of the things there that we discussed here, which is that exam aspirants understand to a very large degree how the private sector would pay them.

They have, you know, been there, they've tried jobs, they've been left disillusioned.

Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward.

My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and this is the 2026 Job Market Series, where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India.

I spoke with Kishan Shastri, who is a postdoctoral research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at Judge Business School.

Before this, he received his PhD in economics in 2026 at the University of Cambridge, where his research focus was the economics of religion and informal institutions.

Hi Kishan, welcome to the show.

It's so great to have you here.

Hi Shruti, thank you so much for having me today.

Your paper is super, super interesting because the only context in which I ever hear about Hindu mats is when my parents or grandparents wanted me to visit one in the southern parts of India.