Join us as on 17th September for the very first Ajay gandhi Memorial Lecture, by Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan
Talk – Democracy and Local Governments: A neglect to be addressed
India currently has the most centralised and therefore lest effective forms of government in the world. Elsewhere, from communist China to capitalist USA, there is a devolution of power to the states, to the counties, and to the towns and villages. The luxury of devolving power or the luxury of putting power in the hands of local bodies is that it greatly increases the chances of successfully delivering services to the people.
We cannot have a one-size-fits-all decision being handed out from New Delhi. We need all the levels of government from the panchayats upwards to focus on meeting people’s needs. For this, we need to change the existing construct by making a more significant devolution of power and resources from the Union government down to the panchayat.
Dr. Palanivel Thiaga Rajan
Dr. Palanivel Thiaga Rajan is the MLA for Madurai Central Constituency in the 15th & 16th Legislative Assemblies of Tamil Nadu. He currently serves as the Minister for Finance & Human Resources Management in the Tamil Nadu Government.
In June 2017 he was appointed as the (founding) Secretary of the newly formed IT Wing of the DMK. In that capacity he has undertaken the build-out of the party’s technology platforms and a cadre of over 1,50,000 Office Bearers across the State. He is also a designated spokesperson for the party, generally focusing on Economic, Budget & State/Central Finances, and Policy matters.
Dr. Rajan previously worked as an International Investment Banker for many years, in several trading, market sales, and management roles at Lehman Brothers (largely in New York), and Standard Chartered Bank (mostly based in Singapore) – where he last served as Senior Managing Director, Financial Markets, overseeing the sales of several fixed-income products globally. Prior to banking, his career spanned Academia, Agriculture, Consulting, Manufacturing, and Research.