India Ideas Conference 2019

"India in Transition"

April 12, 2019

Georgetown University

Washington D.C.

Please RSVP on Eventbrite.

What is the India Ideas Conference?

India’s strategic importance, democratic culture, economic potential, and increasingly affluent and outward-looking population make it a key player on the global stage. Keynote speeches, panel discussions, and breakout sessions will create a picture of the India of the future. Taking a forward-oriented approach to India in a moment of transition, topics will include 2019 elections, infrastructure development and urban growth, innovation in business and social impact sectors, geopolitics in South Asia, and Indian identity. The 2019 conference will be a solutions-oriented platform convening thought leaders from the United States and India to explore India’s complexities, challenges, and opportunities in an era of social and economic change.

Featured Speakers

Ambassador Richard Verma

Ambassador Richard Verma served as the United States ambassador to India from 2015 to 2017. During his two-year tenure, Ambassador Verma managed an unprecedented nine meetings and three summits between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leading to over 100 new initiatives and more than 40 government to government dialogues. He joined the Walsh School of Foreign Service as a Centennial Fellow in 2017 and currently serves as the chairman of The Asia Group, a strategy and capital advisory group.

Ram Guha

Ramachandra Guha is an Indian historian, writer, and public intellectual. He is well known for his 2007 book "India After Gandhi." Guha regularly contributes to a wide variety of newspapers and academic journals, including The Telegraph, Hindustan Times, and Outlook. His works cover a wide variety of topics and he is frequently recognized as one of the major historians of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Krishnamurthy Subramanian

Dr. Krishnamurthy Subramanian is currently the chief economic advisor to the Government of India. A Ph.D. from Chicago-Booth and a top-ranking IIT-IIM alumnus, Krishnamurthy Subramanian is one of the world’s leading experts in banking, corporate governance, and economic policy. Subramanian is on leave from the Indian School of Business, a top business school in India and the only Indian institution to be ranked in the world’s top 100 for path-breaking research.

Jayant Sinha

Jayant Sinha is the current minister of state for civil aviation, a member of the Indian Parliament, and the former minister of state for finance. In May 2014, he was elected to the Lok Sabha, representing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from Hazaribagh, Jharkhand. Before his roles in government, Sinha worked for 12 years with McKinsey & Company as a partner in both their Boston and Delhi offices.

Rajan Bharti Mittal

Rajan Bharti Mittal is a first-generation Indian entrepreneur serving as vice chairman and managing director of Bharti Enterprises. Rajan was honored with the "Indian Business Leader of the Year Award" in 2011 by Horasis. In the same year, he was also awarded the "Leonardo International Prize" by Comitato Leonardo. Rajan is on the Board of Trustees of Brookings Institution, President of ICC (International Chamber of Commerce) in India. In 2009–2010, he was the president of FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) and serves on its Executive and Steering Committees.

Penny Anne Bodle

Penny Bodle is a partner in the London office of SBIA, where she leads Investor Relations and assists with business development for portfolio companies and the major Vision Fund LPs. She began her asset management career at Morgan Stanley Investment Management in New York, where she was a divisional director on the Distribution team working across asset classes in Long Only, Alternatives, and in the Merchant Bank. After leaving MSIM she worked for Jim Pallotta at Raptor Group Holdings, where they invested in a variety of technology, media, entertainment, and real estate assets. While at Raptor, Bodle developed an internal network of large global family offices for the purpose of sharing deal flow, which was subsequently spun into a separate operating business called ShareNett. She also went on to found Fountainhead Partners, working with large multinational family holding companies to identify investment opportunities. She is a senior adviser to Oakpoint Advisers, a third party capital raising business in the US, ACRE real estate, a multifamily owner/operator based in New York and Singapore, and JAZZ Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based fund investing in human performance.

Sandip Somany

Widely recognized as a pioneer of the Indian ceramic industry in India, Sandip Somany is the vice chairman and managing director of HSIL Limited, the leading building materials company in India. An entrepreneur at heart, he joined the family business in the year 1982 and is the driving force behind the company today. Under his leadership that HSIL invested significantly into glass technology and acquired AGI, Krishna Ceremics, Raasi Ceramics and then Garden Polymers. Somany was the president of PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 2012. He is the former president of International Chamber of Commerce India chapter (headquartered in Paris), Chairman of Indian Council of Sanitaryware Manufacturers (INCOSAMA), and member of the Executive Committee of FICCI and Governing Council of All India Glass Manufacturers Association.

Rick Rossow

Rick Rossow is the Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at CSIS. He helps shape policies to promote greater business, economic, and defense engagement. Before working at CSIS, Rossow served as director for South Asia at McLarty Associates, leading the firm’s work for clients in India and the surrounding region. From 1998 to 2008, Rossow served as deputy director of the U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC).

Ambassador Teresita Schaffer

Ambassador Schaffer has had a 30-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, Ambassador Schaffer was recognized as one of the State Department’s leading experts on South Asia, where she spent a total of 11 years. Her other career focus was on international economic issues. She served in U.S. embassies in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and from 1992 to 1995 as U.S. ambassador in Sri Lanka. During her assignments in the State Department in Washington, she was director of the Office of International Trade and later deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East and South Asia, at that time the senior South Asia policy position in the State Department. She is also the author of "India at the Global High Table: The Quest for Regional Primacy and Strategic Autonomy," published in 2016 (co-authored with her husband, Howard Schaffer); as well as "India and the US in the 21st Century: Reinventing Partnership," published in 2009 and widely recognized as the leading work on the post-2000 U.S.-India relationship and its future prospects.

Ambassador Husain Haqqani

Ambassador Husain Haqqani served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011 and as ambassador to Sri Lanka from 1992 to 1993. His distinguished career in government also includes serving as an advisor to four Pakistani prime ministers: Yusuf Raza Gilani, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, and Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi. Ambassador Haqqani is currently the director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute.

Suresh Shenoy

Suresh Shenoy is an Indian-American engineer, business executive, and philanthropist. He is the president of WHEELS Global Foundation (WGF), a non-profit organization that provides tech-driven solutions to rural challenges in water, healthcare, energy, education, livelihood, and sustainability. Shenoy is also executive vice president at Alyx Technologies, a Virginia based IT systems consulting company and has previously served two terms as chairman of the National Capital region of the American Red Cross.

Milan Vaishnav

Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of "When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics" (Yale University Press and HarperCollins India, 2017), which was awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation book prize for the best non-fiction book on contemporary India published in 2017.

Alex Counts

Alex Counts is the president, CEO, and founder of the Grameen Foundation. Before founding the Grameen Foundation, Counts worked in microfinance and poverty reduction for 10 years and was awarded a Fulbright for research in Bangladesh. Counts sits on the Advisory Council of the Center for Financial Inclusion and previously served as the chairman of Fonkoze USA and co-chair of the Fonkoze Family Coordinating Committee.

K. Thiagarajan

K. Thiagarajan is COO at Agastya International Foundation, a non profit charity, which runs world’s largest hands-on Mobile Science Lab program serving the education needs of economically backward school children. Besides operations, he is involved with policy, scaling and replication, people development, funding and innovations in products and services for the foundation. A chemical engineer from IIT Madras, he holds an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad and has spent 33 years working in corporate sector serving diverse sectors such as Engineering, IT, IT Enabled Services and Infrastructure as President, MD & CEO before moving to the social sector with Agastya 10 years before.

Sunil Madan

Sunil Madan joined the Steers Center for Global Real Estate in September 2015 when he relocated to Washington from London. He brings more than 20 years of real estate experience to the center. He has worked in the United States, Europe, and Asia in the private sector, including within the commercial real estate debt groups at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank. Madan received a Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications from Manipal Institute of Technology and an MBA in Finance from Yale University’s School of Management.

Seema Sirohi

Seema Sirohi Washington-based senior journalist specializing in foreign policy and Columnist for Economic Times. As a journalist, she has covered India-US relations for more than two decades for The Telgraph, Outlook and Anand Bazar Patrika, writing on topics ranging from geo-politics and the North-South divide to Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has reported from various nations around the globe, such as Italy, Israel and Pakistan and published opinion pieces in The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The Baltimore Sun. She was also a commentator with National Public Radio and has made various appearences with BBC and CNN. Apart from her career as an analyst and journalist, as an author, she has published a book titled 'Sita’s Curse: Stories of Dowry Victims.'

Sara Eapen

Sara Eapen is Vice President of Science at Aetion, a company and analytics platform providing data-driven technological solutions in healthcare. She is a biostatistician with over 15 years of experience in collaborative clinical research and statistical consulting in academia and industry. She has worked on a variety of projects, including pharmacoeconomics, medical product marketing, health care policy and regulation, and clinical trial analyses.

Rajesh Veeraraghavan

Rajesh Veeraraghavan is an Assistant Professor of Science Technology and International Affairs (STIA) at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and was a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University. He works in the intersection of information technology, development, and governance.

Dhruva Jaishankar

Dhruva Jaishankar is Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings India in New Delhi and the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow with the Lowy Institute in Australia, and is a regular contributor to the Indian and international media on international affairs and security. Jaishankar was previously a Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund (GMF) in Washington, a research assistant at the Brookings Institution, a news writer and reporter for CNN-IBN television in New Delhi, and a Visiting Fellow with the South Asia Programme of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. Jaishankar holds a bachelor's degree in history and classics from Macalester College, and a master's degree in security studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has been a David Rockefeller Fellow with the Trilateral Commission and an IISS-SAIS Merrill Center Young Strategist.

India Ideas Conference 2019

"India in Transition"

What is the India Ideas Conference?

Featured Speakers

27

PRESTIGIOUS PANELISTS

4

PANELS ON PRESSING ISSUES

200

INDIA IDEAS

ATTENDEES IN 2018

Sponsors

India Ideas Conference 2019

"India in Transition"

What is the India Ideas Conference?

Featured Speakers

​

27

PRESTIGIOUS PANELISTS

4

PANELS ON PRESSING ISSUES

200

INDIA IDEAS

ATTENDEES IN 2018

Sponsors