Ever since India implemented sweeping economic reforms in 1991, investors and journalists, as well as scholars and students, have been keeping a close watch on its progress. At the end of this month, Cornell will host a weekend workshop devoted to India's emerging economy and featuring some of the people who are most familiar with it.

"Indian National Economic Policy in an Era of Global Reform: An Assessment" will be held March 29-30 in Room 401 of Warren Hall. Free and open to the public, the workshop is being organized by Cornell's South Asia Program with the co- sponsorship of several departments and programs, including the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and departments of economics and city and regional planning.

"This workshop will provide an academic forum at which scholars from different disciplines, including political science, economics and social anthropology -- as well as from the business community -- can share recent interpretations of the wide-ranging economic reforms that characterize contemporary India," said Shelley Feldman, director of the South Asia Program.

On Friday, March 29, Kirit S. Parikh will give a lecture titled "India's Power Needs and the Role of U.S. Firms" from 2 to 3 p.m. in Room D of Goldwin Smith Hall. Parikh is director of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Bombay. Since receiving his master's and doctoral degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, he has served on the prime minister's Economic Advisory Council, as president of the Indian Econometric Society and as professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. Last year he was a consultant to the prime minister on the controversial ENRON electric power plant, which was canceled in August.

"Dr. Parikh is one of the most distinguished economists currently working in India," said Tapan Mitra, professor and chair of Cornell's economics department. "He is recognized as an outstanding scholar in the fields of economics and civil engineering and as a very influential policy-maker." Also on Friday, Atul Kohli, professor of politics in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, will give a lecture from 4:45 to 5:30 p.m. titled "Political Obstacles to Economic Progress in India: The Current Reforms."

Kohli, a former member of the International Peace and Security Committee of the Social Science Research Council, is the current president of the program committee of the American Political Science Association and a member of the Asia Society's advisory council. He is the author of Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability and The State and Poverty in India: the Politics of Reform.

Friday's final speaker will be Leslie Elliott Armijo, a professor in the department of political science at Northeastern University, who will give a talk titled "Mixed Blessings: Foreign Capital Inflows and Democracy in 'Emerging Markets,'" from 5:45 to 6:30 p.m.

Saturday will feature two sessions. The morning session, titled "The Indian Economy: Five Years After the Crisis," will be chaired by Cornell's Erik Thorbecke, the H. Edward Babcock Professor of Economics and Food Economics, and will include Parikh, Purnendu Chatterjee, manager of The Quantum Fund; Karen Parker, a professor in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School; and Nirvikar Singh, professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In an afternoon panel titled "National Economic Policy or Liberalized Market Regimes: A False Choice?" speakers will include Prabhat Patnaik, a professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli; Amiya Bagchi, a professor at the Centre for Studies on Social Sciences at the University of Calcutta; and Ajit Singh, a professor of economics at Cambridge University. Following that session will be a panel from 4:30 to 6 p.m. featuring scholars from Cornell as well as from Syracuse University and Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Both Parikh and Kohli are visiting Cornell as University Lecturers, a program begun at the turn of this century by Goldwin Smith to bring the world's foremost scholars to Cornell. In the past, such scholars have included George Wald, Nobel laureate in medicine; novelist, playwright and essayist Carlos Fuentes; and Oxford University historian Christopher Hill.

Future Cornell University Lecturers include Donald Kagan, professor of history and classics at Yale University, who will speak on April 1, and P.E. Peters, professor of Near Eastern languages and literatures and history at New York University, who will speak on April 18.