SKOCH Summit
India’s ambition to achieve developed-economy status by 2047 under the Viksit Bharat vision rests on expanding productive capacity, on engineering a structural transition toward innovation-led, knowledge-intensive growth. It is a transition that is fundamentally contingent on the quality, coherence and forward-orientation of its regulatory architecture.
This conference advances the argument that regulatory framework design is a primary macroeconomic variable, not a secondary administrative consideration and that India’s ability to sustain high-quality growth over the coming decades will be determined in significant part by whether its institutions are recalibrated to incentivise discovery, reward complexity and attract long-horizon investment.
Drawing on productivity economics and institutional analysis, the conference examines the relationship between regulatory design and key economic performance indicators (including total factor productivity (TFP), incremental capital-output ratio (ICOR) and the depth of industrial upgrading) to demonstrate that regulatory fragmentation, compliance asymmetries and institutional gaps represent binding constraints on India’s innovation potential. It will interrogate a critical structural tension at the heart of India’s development moment. The gap between a regulatory environment historically optimised for factor-driven, imitation-based industrial expansion and the demands of an economy seeking to compete at the knowledge frontier.
Rather than just focusing on deregulation, it is an opportune time for India to advance a capability-centric model of regulatory modernisation, one that builds institutional credibility, reduces uncertainty for R&D-intensive investors and creates the enabling conditions for domestically anchored innovation ecosystems to take root and scale.
It will further explore how strategic alignment with international regulatory standards and global best practices can function as an instrument of economic statecraft, strengthening India’s positioning in global value chains while preserving the sovereign policy space essential for inclusive development.
This conference will offer both a diagnostic of India’s current regulatory limitations and a rigorous, actionable reform agenda for institutions, policymakers and industry stakeholders committed to making Viksit Bharat an economic reality.
Arrival, Tea, Meet and Greet
Picture with Mr Sameer Kochhar, Chairman, SKOCH Group
Inaugural Session: Regulatory Framework for Viksit Bharat
Opening Remarks:
Keynote: Prof S Mahendra Dev, Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM)
Dr Shekhar Aiyar, Director and Chief Executive, ICRIER
Prof Sachin Kumar Sharma, Director General, RIS
Reserved
Tea Break
Prof S Mahendra Dev
Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM)
He served as Director and Vice Chancellor of IGIDR, Mumbai (2010–2022) and earlier chaired the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices. He was Vice Chairman of IFPRI’s Board, a member of the National Statistical Commission, and Director of CESS, Hyderabad. He has 150 publications, 23 books, and has advised global agencies and Indian government committees. He has received several awards, including the Malcolm Adisesaiah Award.
Dr Shekhar Aiyar
Director and Chief Executive, ICRIER
Shekhar Aiyar is Director and Chief Executive of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). Previously he held a number of senior roles at the International Monetary Fund, including Assistant Director of the Research Department and Mission Chief for Germany. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University, an Advisor to the Bank of England and a Non-Resident Fellow at Bruegel. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, while also writing columns for the New York Times and Financial Times. He holds a BA in Economics from Delhi University, an MA in Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University.
Prof Sachin Kumar Sharma
Director General, RIS
Prof. Sharma brings over two decades of expertise in international trade development cooperation, and multilateral and regional negotiations. His research, advocacy, and capacity-building work have shaped discussions on trade and development, agricultural subsidies, investment, food security, sustainability, market access, trade disputes, transparency, LDC graduation, Aid for Trade, and negotiations at the WTO, FAO, G20, and in regional trade agreements.
He holds an M.Phil. and a PhD in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, with a specialisation in the WTO, international trade, quantitative techniques, and agricultural policy. He is skilled in econometrics, Computable General Equilibrium (GTAP), Partial Equilibrium Modelling, and statistical tools, with extensive experience in trade analytics.
A prolific scholar, Prof. Sharma has authored six books, numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, several working papers, and book chapters, in addition to regularly contributing to policy debates through articles in leading newspapers and participating in global forums.
Before joining RIS, he served as a Professor at the Centre for WTO Studies (CWS) at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade. At CWS, he led and supervised a multidisciplinary team of economists, lawyers, and officials, working on a wide range of economic, development, and legal issues. His evidence-based policy inputs, analysis, and recommendations were extensively utilised by many developing countries and LDCs to comply with WTO obligations and to advance negotiations on agriculture and sustainability, including securing the perpetual peace clause on food security and shaping disciplines on domestic support.
Through knowledge sharing, critical inputs on proposals, and capacity-building initiatives, he also coordinated with key members of the G-33 to develop and advocate common negotiating positions among high-level policymakers of developing countries and LDCs.
Representing India, he made significant contributions to South-South Cooperation through WTO proposals on domestic support, sustainability, food security, cotton, Special and Differential Treatment, and several other issues, many of which were co-sponsored by 75 countries from the G-33, OACPS, and the African Group. His initiatives played a pivotal role in invoking the Bali Peace Clause, thereby safeguarding India’s public stockholding programs for food security from WTO disputes. As an integral member of the Indian delegation, he played a crucial role in negotiations at the last five WTO Ministerial Conferences. He has conducted numerous training programmes on trade issues to strengthen South-South cooperation and collaborated with leading organisations, think tanks, and UN agencies.
As Director General of RIS, Prof. Sharma envisions strengthening RIS as the premier institution of the Global South, providing cutting-edge, development-oriented research and policy dialogue on contemporary global economic challenges. He aims to further RIS’s mission of fostering South-South cooperation, supporting evidence-based policymaking, and ensuring that the voices of developing countries are strongly represented in the international economic discourse.
Mr Sameer Kochhar
Chairman, SKOCH Group
Reforms historian and author of best-seller ModiNomics, Sameer Kochhar is Chairman, SKOCH Group. He is a passionate advocate of social, digital and financial inclusion and is a foremost expert on governance and inclusive growth. His work has been acclaimed globally and endorsed by Mr Narendra Modi, Mr M Venkaiah Naidu, Dr Manmohan Singh, Mr Arun Jaitley, Mr P Chidambaram, Mr Yashwant Sinha, Dr C Rangarajan and Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia and so on. In his thinking and writings and activities, his profound admiration for India's economic reforms and in extension, those outstanding personalities who strive to make these reforms more meaningful and broad-based comes out clear and unambiguous.
Panel: Innovation and Moving India Up the Value Chain
The conference argues that the design of regulatory frameworks must be treated as a primary macroeconomic variable, with direct implications for total factor productivity, investment efficiency, industrial upgrading and India’s ability to attract long-horizon capital.
This panel will extend that argument into the practical domain of emerging sectors and disruptive technologies. India cannot afford a regulatory culture that is either blindly permissive or reflexively prohibitive. Excessive risk aversion can push innovation offshore, discourage experimentation, slow technology adoption and trap firms in lower-value segments of production. Equally, weak or poorly designed regulation can create consumer harm, systemic risks, market distortions and loss of public trust. The challenge is to develop institutions that can distinguish between real risks and speculative fears, between necessary safeguards and avoidable compliance burdens and between responsible innovation and regulatory arbitrage.
The central question for this panel is not whether India should regulate innovation, but how it should build the regulatory capacity to engage with innovation intelligently, proportionately and confidently. Moderated by Prof Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, whose work on regulatory governance brings together economics, law, institutions and public policy, the discussion examines how India can strengthen regulators' analytical capabilities. Mr Pradeep S. Mehta’s expertise in Regulatory Impact Assessment helps frame the need for evidence-based rulemaking, cost-benefit analysis, stakeholder consultation, sunset clauses, competition assessment and institutional feedback loops. Dr Raghavender GR brings the perspective of intellectual property and pharmaceuticals, where innovation depends on a delicate balance among incentives for research, affordability, public health, technology transfer and global competitiveness. Mr Dilip Chenoy speaks about Web3 and Virtual Digital Assets, where the regulatory challenge is especially sharp: how to protect consumers and financial stability without dismissing an entire technological architecture that may shape future digital infrastructure, tokenisation, payments, contracts and decentralised applications.
The panel explores how India can move from a compliance-centric model to a capability-centric regulatory state. This includes regulatory sandboxes, adaptive licensing, sector-specific innovation cells, better inter-regulatory coordination, stronger technical talent inside regulators, data-driven supervision, faster clarification mechanisms and more predictable enforcement. It should also consider how standards, intellectual property, competition policy, digital public infrastructure and international regulatory alignment can help Indian firms scale globally.
Ultimately, innovation will flourish in India only when entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and regulators operate within a framework of trust, clarity and learning. For Viksit Bharat, regulation must not merely police disruption after it arrives; it must help India anticipate, absorb, govern and lead it.
Prof Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Consulting Editor, Business Standard & Professor of Practice, OP Jindal Global University
Dr Raghavender GR, Senior Consultant (IPR), Dept for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade (DPIIT), Govt. of India
Mr Dilip Chenoy, Chairperson, Bharat Web3 Association
Mr Pradeep S Mehta, Secretary General, CUTS International
Reserved
Lunch
Prof Subhomoy Bhattacharjee
Consulting Editor, Business Standard & Professor of Practice, OP Jindal Global University
Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, with twenty-two years of experience in journalism, is a Consulting Editor for Business Standard. His areas of interest include public policy, especially regulatory issues, finance and urban development.
He is the author of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in India: Myths and Realities. He has authored a study on the Land Acquisition Act, a project on comparative land prices in India’s selected districts and its relation with industrialisation, commissioned by GIZ, India, and TARI. He has previously contributed to other books, including Media at Work in China and India: Discovering and Dissecting (SAGE, 2015).
Subhomoy studied economics at Shri Ram College of Commerce and at Delhi School of Economics, both affiliated to the University of Delhi. He began his career as a civil servant, joining the Indian Information Service through the civil services exam. He has subsequently worked with The Economic Times and was until recently the deputy editor at The Indian Express while writing for The Financial Express too.
Presently, he is also a consultant with Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries (RIS). He frequently appears on television and radio on economic news programmes and has lectured in several universities in India and abroad, on public policy.
Mr Pradeep S Mehta
Secretary General, CUTS International
A student of law and economics, Pradeep Mehta (78) is the founder Secretary General of the Jaipur-based Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS International), a global economic policy research, advocacy and networking, NGO, established in 1983 in India, with centres in Nairobi, Lusaka, Hanoi, Accra, Geneva and Washington DC.
Currently he is a Member of the WTO DG’s NGO Advisory Board, for the third time, among several other bodies. He has also served on the India G20/B20’s Council on Africa’s Economic Integration, GOI’s Board of Trade; Better Regulatory Advisory Group; Steering Committee on Ecomark etc.
Recipient of the M R Pai Award in 2007, Scindia School’s Old Boy of Eminence Award in 2018, the SKOCH Excellence Award in 2021 and for BW Social Impact Award in 2023 for his dedication to promoting competition and consumer protection.
Appointed as Professor of Practice, Public Policy at the JECRC University, Jaipur in 2026 and has been a visitng Afellow at Loyola University, Chicago and Manchester .University, UK.
A prolific writer and change maker, Mehta has been defined by the noted economist: Jagdish Bhagwati as a living treasure and a gift to India.
Dr Raghavender GR
Dr Raghavender GR, Senior Consultant (IPR), Dept for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade (DPIIT), Govt. of India
Dr. G.R. Raghavender is a distinguished expert in Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and a retired Joint Secretary to the Government of India and currently serve as Senior Consultant (IPR) at the Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade (DPIIT), Government of India. A career civil servant from the Central Secretariat Service (CSS) selected through the UPSC Civil Services Examination, 1988.
During his service, he held several key leadership positions, including Joint Secretary in the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law & Justice, and Joint Secretary in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (now DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce & Industry. He also had an additional charge as Director General of the National Productivity Council (NPC) from November 2015 to May 2016. As Registrar of Copyrights at the Indian Copyright Office for over six and a half years, he played a pivotal role in shaping India’s modern copyright framework, including spearheading the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012, the Copyright Rules, 2013, and the implementation of online registration and payment gateway for copyright, the digitisation of documents, the adoption of a distinctive office logo, and the successful attainment of ISO 9001 certification in 2014.
At the international level, he actively participated in multiple WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) meetings, RCEP negotiations, and several Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations, including the recently concluded India–EU FTA,2026 as a member of the Indian delegation. I contributed to the successful conclusion of two landmark international instruments: the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances (2012) and the Marrakesh Treaty (2013). He also contributed to the recently concluded WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK), 2024 and the Riyadh Design Law Treaty (RDLT), 2024.
Further, he also served as a WIPO resource person and copyright law expert in Singapore, Chengdu, and Kampuchea and contributed to the revision of copyright legislation in Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, the Philippines, and Myanmar. In addition, he regularly give talks on various IPR subjects at international and national seminars, including programmes organised by WIPO, Geneva, and at leading law universities and institutions across India.
Academically, he holds a PhD in IPR, with research focused on IP protection in the context of text and data mining and artificial intelligence, an LLM and LLB, and an MA in Development Studies (Public Policy & Management) at ISS, The Hague, the Netherlands.
Mr Dilip Chenoy
Chairperson, Bharat Web3 Association
Mr. Dilip Chenoy is Chairperson, Bharat Web3 Association. He has held leadership roles across India's foremost industry bodies, including as Secretary-General of FICCI, MD & CEO of NSDC, Director-General of SIAM, and Deputy Director-General of CII, with extensive contributions to policy and industry development.