Vimal Kumar

What connects Shiva’s Tandava with Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction — and with this year’s Economics Nobel? Did ancient India grasp the essence of creative destruction long before the West? 👇 business-standard.com/economy/analys… (with a little help from AI) #NobelPrize #Economics #Schumpeter #CreativeDestruction #Shiva #IndianPhilosophy #AI

@karandi65 @NITIAayog Congratulations, Prof. Karandikar.

It is my privilege to take charge today as Member, @NITIAayog & contribute to India’s development journey through science, technology, innovation & evidence-based policymaking. The opportunity to work at the intersection of public policy, research, emerging technologies, sustainability and inclusive growth is both exciting & deeply meaningful. I look forward to engaging with colleagues, States, institutions, industry, and young innovators in advancing the vision of Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri @narendramodi ji for #ViksitBharat2047.

Heartiest congratulations to Prof. Manindra Agrawal (@Director_IITK) on being elected Fellow of the Royal Society. It is among the highest global honors in science. A proud moment for IIT Kanpur and Indian academia, and a well-deserved recognition of his outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics.

My article in Navbharat Times argues that Mythos-like AI models may change the economics of cybersecurity. India’s choice is clear: remain a customer of frontier cyber-AI tools, or build the capacity to understand, audit, and develop them. Digital adoption was phase one. Digital resilience is next.

RTE’s 25% quota is a necessary step—but admission alone isn’t inclusion. navbharattimes.indiatimes.com/education/expe…

@karthik_econ @GajaCapital @PenguinIndia Congratulations!

Deeply honored and grateful to have won the 2025 @GajaCapital book prize, and to the jury award letter for noting that: "We are confident that your book will inspire millions just as it inspired us" Holiday reading recommendation! @PenguinIndia amazon.in/Accelerating-I…

Degrees once guaranteed jobs. They don’t anymore. In today’s digital & AI-driven economy, skills matter — but skills without education have limits. My op-ed in Navbharat Times on why India needs new-age skills and evolving universities. share.google/DvqLudw49VktiX…

@svoruganti1466 Congratulations!

Assumed office of Chief Secretary, Government of Rajasthan today. Dt 17 November 2025

Couldn’t agree more. Though I do think the greater responsibility lies with top academics—once they choose to enter political debates, they inevitably invite all kinds of potshots. And I don’t mean this about any one side; scholars from both ends of the spectrum have often used their stature to comment on matters far outside their expertise. That’s where things start to go wrong. Also, that's when credibility starts to fray.

True, that Vimal ji @vimalk_singh ! This honesty you talk about is what we need, and it is not easy to achieve. Perhaps impossible. For the critic to be sure that what they are offering is an academic/scholarly critique and not a political one is as difficult as it is for the scholar to be non-partisan. The best is to acknowledge this limitation and create platforms for decent, democratic dialogue.

When Amartya Sen won the Nobel for Economics, many of his ideas, and less technical essays, started coming down from the high academic world to common readers. After casually flipping through them, a friend of mine, an IITian, and hence considered brilliant by everyone (including himself), told me that there is nothing great about his work, and anyone could do all that development thinking: a bit of probability, elementary mathematics, a lot of rhetoric, choice, equality and other everyday words. In other words, even a low-ranking engineering graduate from a mediocre Engineering College (In 1998, there were no world rankings of institutions, but in 2011, IIT Kanpur was ranked somewhere below 250 in the world), could presume that he was intellectually superior to a Nobel Prize winner in a social science discipline. Through some strange twists, the Francesca Orsini affair has sparked a war of disciplines––more accurately, an assault on the humanities and social sciences––on social media and other platforms. It's a caricature of what CP Snow had once called the battle between "The Two Cultures". For it to be a genuine war, we need the best practitioners of both 'cultures' speaking to each other, understanding one another, and THEN critiquing each other. In an age of superspecialization, that seems hardly possible, and that is quite understandable. I have no way of proving it, but I know it by intuition, that the best in any field will not berate the best in another field, even if their own ideas lead to very different conclusions. While we celebrate Dante's Ptolemaic geocentric world in his great epic, we do not say Copernicus and Gallileo, and the whole of modern science is a mere superstition. Tagore and J C Bose were friends, but Bose never wanted to write a lyric, and Tagore never wanted to do science. There were many challenges to Freud, including some from his own disciples, but Einstein never questioned Freud's intellect. So when a science or commerce guy criticises top humanities and social science scholars, you know how mediocre they are in their own fields; and the vice-versa.

When Adam Smith (yes, Adam Smith himself) calls to tell you you’ve won the Nobel… Joel Mokyr: “I had a whole list of people who might win… I wasn’t on it.” Who says economics doesn’t have a sense of humor? youtu.be/AQDCzTNBb2E?si… #JoelMokyr #NobelPrize #Economics #HumorInEconomics

Happy to share our new piece in Business Standard on how AI is reshaping the economy — and why India’s education system must keep pace. Co-authored with Bikram. business-standard.com/economy/analys… #AI #Education #Economy #India #Policy #FutureOfWork #HigherEducation @IITKanpur @iitk_econ

@IITKanpur Profs. Vivek Kant, J. Ramkumar, Praveena Ji (DD, UP Panchayati Raj ), Kalshetti Ji (DD, YASHADA), Sharad Ji Ex-Chairman, Zila Parishad Pune. We brought governance, policy & AI into the PRI classroom, while blending design, sustainability & leadership to empower grassroots leaders

@IITKanpur The workshop had an outstanding team of trainers: Prof. Alok (ex-CS Tripura; Visiting Professor, IITK), Sushil Ji ex-Secy Mines, GoI), Profs. Satyaki Roy, Deepu Philip, Rajeev Jindal, Vimal Kumar #LeadershipDevelopment #CapacityBuilding

@IITKanpur signed an MoU with the Govt of UP to train 500+ Panchayati Raj officials. I organized the first workshop (Aug 26–30), which brought together Zila Parishad Adhyakshas, Block Pramukhs, and officials. #CapacityBuilding #GrassrootsGovernance

@karandi65 @IndiaDST @ANRFIndia @PIB_India @MIB_India @airnewsalerts @mygovindia @PMOIndia @DrJitendraSingh @dpradhanbjp @PrinSciAdvGoI Thank you for this much-needed push. In the AI age, tech, economics, philosophy & governance must move together. Economics is STEM in the US, often with greater weight. Tech is science shaped by society. And society must be understood deeply.

When Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) was established, it was envisaged that it would also support research at the intersection of Humanities & Social Sciences and Science & Technology.

Delivered a talk on Economics of Big Data & AI @ Paradox, IIT Madras. Great to see a packed room, curious minds, and first-time explorers of economics! Kudos to @iitmadras BS Data Science team—Prof. Andrew Thangaraj & Ms. Bharathi—for this stellar initiative! 🙌

📢 Economics is gaining prominence in India's top tech institutes like IITs. Our article in Business Standard delves into this trend. A must-read for JEE aspirants and their families. Read here: business-standard.com/economy/analys… #Economics #IIT #JEE2025 #HigherEducation @iitk_econ