This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Mekhala Krishnamurthy, a Senior Fellow at CPR where she built the State Capacity Initiative.

Krishnamurthy has spent the last 15 years engaging with questions of how the state interacts with markets and the broader economy, and what the actual lived experiences of those on the frontlines of these intersections can tell policymakers – particularly in the fields of health and agriculture. An alumna of Harvard, Cambridge and University College London, she is also Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University, and taught at Shiv Nadar University prior to that.

At CPR, Krishnamurthy set up the State Capacity Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and practice programme that has carried out pioneering research studies on the Indian administrative state, and worked directly with a number of governments on questions of institutional design and capacity.

In the first part of the conversation with Krishnamurthy, we spoke about what it means to be an anthropologist in the development world, how she has managed to bridge academic and policy practitioner positions, and her reading of major shifts in India’s policy discourse over the last few decades.

In the second part of the conversation, we spoke about her research and writing on mandis and Indian agriculture, the idea behind the State Capacity Initiative, and her advice for younger scholars entering the policy world.