Rathin Roy on How India Slices the Fiscal Pie

Today my guest is Rathin Roy, who's a Distinguished Fellow at the Kautilya School of Public Policy and a Visiting Senior Fellow at ODI Global. His main research interests are political economy, public finance, and development economics, and he also served on the 13th Finance Commission. We talked about India's fiscal resources are distributed across states and between the union and state governments, the divergence between rich and poor states, compensatory welfare and its consequences and much more.

Recorded July 8th, 2025.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:38) - India’s Fiscal Federalism System

(00:22:46) - India’s Welfare State

(00:34:19) - Unequal Growth

(00:45:58) - Consumption Taxes

(01:02:30) - Public Finance in India

(01:27:06) - Outro