Anita asked Chirantan what motivated him to move from engineering into journalism and then into management.

Chirantan’s response to this reflected such a deep commitment to ideas that it is hard to capture them in a summary.   He talked fundamentally about the inspiration he took from the work of Nobel-Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who came from the same area of India – around Calcutta – as Chirantan.  Sen’s work focuses in part on the challenges of justice, which Chirantan illustrated by referencing Sen’s famous question:  Who should get access to a flute?   Should it be person A, who made the flute, and who might profit from selling it?  Should it be person B, who is a great floutist, and who can make music that everyone can enjoy?  Or should it be person C, who represents the government, and who can provide a low-cost ticket to a flute concert to anyone who wants to go, and then subsequently license out access to the flute to other governments?  

The analogy in Chirantan’s own work on the provision of pharmaceuticals to the poor in low-income countries such as India is that Person A is the innovator, while, under Person B, the intellectual property behind the medicine is free, and under Person C, the medicine is owned by the government.   The challenge in this example is in balancing access to the medicine (which Person B maximizes) with the reward to the innovation in the first place by Person A.   Person C is offered as the compromise.

Chirantan explained in context of his own intellectual journal the deep complexities of balancing the tradeoffs between access and innovation.  He talked about a wide range of complicated constructs, but the bottom line is that the challenge for public policy – the government in the flute example – is in developing mechanisms that cultivate both incentives for innovation and the distribution of its fruits.  

Anita asked Chirantan about his recent book called “Flattening the Curve,” which takes up these issues in context of the COVID crisis.  

Chirantan explained that the book deals with precisely these issues in sections on health, innovation, and economics.   He talked about the difficulty of coming up with policies such as around lockdowns and distribution of vaccines.   The difficulty, he explained, is in the details of trying to figure out just how much risk is borne as innovation occurs, and whether local institutions like Universities can lower than risk, which in turn might lower the cost of innovating and so flatten the curve on access.

Anita described Chirantan as the Amartya Sen in his interests in democratizing access to the scientific processes behind innovations.   Where Sen wanted to democratize access to the outputs of innovation processes, Chirantan wants to democratize the framing of innovation problems and the science behind them.

What makes Chirantan optimistic?

Three thing:  1.  Young people, who ask profound questions and offer profoundly creative answers, such as why can’t there be a person D who makes another flute and a person E who plays it better than person B?    We need new questions and new answers from our students and the next generation.   2.   Communication technologies that allow everyone access to ideas and information that once was so much more difficult to track down.   Someone might listen to this podcast, for example, and come up with a new business model.    3.    The appetite for addressing and resolving grand challenges like rising temperatures and the climate transition and healthcare for the poor.