Abstract:

In the last two decades, India has seen a rapid expansion in the higher education sector. There has been a dramatic rise in the number of higher education institutions and enrolment has increased four-fold. The Indian higher education system is now one of the largest in the world. India’s gross enrolment ratio in 2018-19 was 26.3%, but it is still far from meeting the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s target of achieving 32% GER by 2022. Institutions have thus far failed to identify the true potential of a high-quality education system. This report highlights five critical challenges—low capacity of institutions with respect to students and teachers, weak governance, insufficient funding, below par research activity and complex regulatory norms—which must be addressed to create globally relevant and competitive institutions that can produce employable graduates.  While also referring to the Draft National Education Policy 2019 and latest data from comparable economies and All India Survey on Higher Education (2018-19), this report makes targeted recommendations to transform the higher education sector in India.

Panellists:

R. Subrahmanyam is the Secretary of the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development. He has been a true champion and advocate for the expansion of access to and qualitative improvement in higher education in India.

Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao is the Director at IIT Delhi. He is widely published in the areas of nano-scale devices and nanoelectronics and is a co-founder of two deep technology start-ups which are developing products of relevance to the society.

Prof. Pankaj Chandra is the Vice Chancellor of Ahmedabad University. He was also a member of ‘The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education’. His book titled ‘Building Universities that Matter’ studies issues of governance, change and institution building in Indian universities.

Pramath Raj Sinha is the Founder and Managing Director of the Harappa Education. He has been instrumental in establishing many high quality institutions of higher education in India over the past 20 years. Pramath was the founding dean of ISB and is a co-founder and trustee of Ashoka University.

Please find below the agenda for the event:

Please RSVP ngupta@brookingsindia.org and contact zkazmi@brookingsindia.org for media inquiries.

       

• On 7th November 2019, Brookings India in collaboration with the European Union Delegation to India organised a panel discussion titled ‘The European Union and India: Strategic Partners on Multilateralism and Global Governance’. The keynote address was given by  Christian Leffler, Deputy Secretary-General for Economic and Global Issues, European External Action Service.
• The expert level panel included  Shyam Saran, Former Foreign Secretary (2004-06) and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research and Mr. G. Balasubramanian, Joint Secretary Europe West, Ministry of External Affairs. The panel was moderated by Dr. Constantino Xavier, Fellow, Foreign Policy at Brookings India.
• In attendance were officials from EU member- state embassies, officials from the EU delegation to India, former Indian foreign secretaries and ambassadors, scholars from India’s leading think tanks and universities and members of the media.

Multilateralism: A Shared Vision for Europe and India

Leffler’s keynote address stressed on the importance of multilateralism as a shared value between the EU and India, and its importance in a polarised world. Referring to multilateralism as both the ideal and necessary approach, he outlined three thrusts of the EU-India partnership: first, the common goal of helping preserve a rules-based world order. Second, the need to modernise the United Nations and assist it in preserving multilateralism in rapidly changing circumstances. Finally, the need to lead the discussion on multilateral solutions to the great problems of today, with a focus on exploiting the digital revolution.

The Deputy Secretary General also discussed some of the EU’s contributions to maintaining peace, including its recent efforts in Venezuela and its sixteen peace and stability missions. Finally, Leffler briefly outlined some of the most promising areas of India- EU strategic cooperation, such as on artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, UN peacekeeping missions and more. Multilateralism was projected as a core value underlying the EU’s own efforts and its partnership with India, with ‘openness, transparency, respect, fairness and inclusiveness’ being the important factors in strengthening the EU- India agenda moving forward. In a world reeling from climate change, conflict and insecurity, Leffler noted, the importance of working together is paramount.

The Expanding EU-India Relationship

Amb. Saran opened the panel discussion by reinforcing Leffler’s point on multilateralism, referring back to a statement he made in 2004 where he had mentioned the twin goals of multilateralism and multipolarity. He noted that the global context has changed, but the need to respect each other’s opinions, values and goals has not. For example, challenging fundamentalism, terrorism and other violent threats to peace and stability is a shared goal for both the EU and India, and there must be a constant focus on bringing all stakeholders together to resolve longstanding political instability. Thus, under the guiding beacon of multilateralism, the scope of the EU-India relationship is expanding as the world changes. Amb. Saran further recalled the strong EU-India momentum of the 2000s, which pioneered a push on various economic and security fronts (including intelligence sharing, and a trade deal which was close to completion). He also argued that this positive dynamic then withered away after 2009. On the other hand, he noted that the current global uncertainty is encouraging the EU and India to revive their partnership and finish the business they began twenty years ago (at the first summit) in Lisbon. Joint Secretary G. Balasubramanian agreed with this, mentioning the EU-India strategic partnership (active since 2004) and the expanded cooperation in key new fields: artificial intelligence, digital economy and climate change. The speaker also noted the widening scope of the security relationship between the two partners, with a move towards more concrete measures in that regard. India has recently been giving patrolling support to European ships, and some EU ships have been increasing their port calls to India. Further, India’s contribution to UN Peacekeeping missions is a key example of its respect for multilateralism, and another area of EU-India strategic coordination.

Leffler added that these expanding partnerships present the opportunity for the EU and India to project the lessons learnt from open, peaceful and multilateral discussions on a global scale- in other words, the EU and India can look towards becoming standard-setters for fair discussion and negotiation and challenge the polarisation rampant in world affairs today. Even if the multilateral approach is slower and at times more cumbersome, it is the most comprehensive, holistic way to make democratic discussions, and the two parties can encourage the UN, allies and the global community to follow this approach. Expanding on this point, the speaker noted that the EU’s multilateralism used to be chided for being ‘boring and predictable’, but that in today’s world, ‘boring and predictable were qualities in high demand’.

Working Together to Strengthen Democracy

Following the discussion, the floor was opened to questions from the audience. These questions addressed core aspects of the EU-India dynamic. One audience member asked Leffler about the EU’s views on reform within the United Nations, and whether those views align with India’s on key concerns such as a revamp of the Security Council. Leffler responded that the UN needs to modify and modernise itself in line with changing global circumstances and reaffirm the commitment to multilateralism which the organisation claims to protect. Responding to a question on whether public diplomacy can play a major role in India-EU relations, Balasubramanian replied in the affirmative, noting the importance of Indian students in Europe, the increasing availability of technical courses and higher education courses in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, and other people-to-people contacts. Moreover, Indian students who go to Europe become acquainted with the European way of life, and enrich the cultural exchange between the two regions, leading to more familiarity and ground-level contact. ‘Track 1.5’ policy dialogues, such as the EU-India Think Tank Twinning Initiative were identified as helping incubate new proposals for EU-India cooperation.

Responding to a question on the nature of the EU- India dynamic, Amb. Saran noted that both parties seek to establish and sustain open, democratic spaces where discussion flows freely and all concerns are accounted for. This common goal arises from India’s commitment to multilateralism and democratic expression, and finds resonance in the EU as well. Creating wider spaces that are more democratic is a goal that will benefit both parties and allow them to follow up on common objectives in a peaceful, consensus-driven manner.

       

“Take a deep breath. Release. Take a deep breath. Release. Concentrate on the noises coming from the environment. What do you hear? Slowly, focus on your own breathing.” A grade 7 teacher at Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya in Delhi, walks her students through a breathing exercise. After three minutes, she says, “When you are ready, start moving your toes; start moving your fingers; now, slowly, open your eyes.” This is a typical morning in happiness class.

Education systems around the world are facing challenges in preparing students to deal with the demands of unpredictable environments. Specific to India, children growing up in adverse circumstances and coming into the school system as first-generation learners don’t have the foundational capacities to learn and engage in the classroom. Moreover, depression is a serious issue among youth, with an increasing number of suicides each year. In addition, the World Happiness Report, 2019 ranked India 140 out of 156 countries. In response, the Delhi government launched the happiness curriculum in all 1,030 government schools from kindergarten through grade 8 in July 2018. In line with the vision for India’s education system as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-4), the implementation of the curriculum is a landmark first step in expanding a formal, public education system to focus on the holistic development of all learners, invest in their well-being, and improve the overall quality of education.

The development of the curriculum began with one question: What makes a good life? Traditionally, education has been oriented toward making a living, but it does not teach students how to make a good life and contribute to society. The Delhi government set out to solve this problem, and approximately 40 total teachers, in partnership with four NGOs, were chosen to write a curriculum that would develop “emotionally sound students.” Before writing the curriculum, the teachers were trained in what is known as “Madhyasth Darshan” or “coexistential thought,” which is based on understanding all aspects of life, including spiritual, intellectual, behavioral, and material. According to this philosophy, life satisfaction and happiness can be achieved by being aware of the self, body, family, society, nature, and universe in order to live in harmony. However, while the Madhyasth Darshan program is designed for adults, the nonprofit Dream a Dream trained the mentor teachers to work with children using contextualized empathy-based pedagogies and a life skills approach for children. This philosophy permeates the happiness curriculum to address the learners’ emotional and mental needs by creating a stimulating environment through mindfulness, critical thinking, storytelling and experiential, play-based activities. In the happiness classes, it is not about being right or wrong; it is about allowing students to express themselves, without judgement. Teachers are not required to finish the syllabus, but rather, to ensure that all children internalize and understand the concepts taught and have the opportunity to participate.

Sound too good to be true? Are the students happier because of the happiness curriculum? That’s the question that is on the minds of the Delhi government, curriculum developers, happiness coordinators, teachers, and parents.

The happiness project

Over a nine-month period, the Brookings Institution is partnering with Dream a Dream to develop measures that can assess the happiness curriculum by looking at whether there are changes in teacher and student behaviors attributable to the curriculum—a first step to evaluating its effectiveness.

The goals of the project are:
1. to understand and identify the factors that contribute to happiness;
2. to develop measures that capture teacher and student behaviors associated with the factors that contribute to happiness; and
3. to analyze the curriculum to identify the expected standards regarding teacher and student behaviors.

Recently, the Brookings and Dream a Dream teams were in Delhi to get a more complete picture of the curriculum. They spent five days visiting schools, observing happiness classes, talking with developers of the curriculum, and meeting with the Minister of Education, as well as engaging in focus group discussions with mentor and classroom teachers, happiness coordinators, and students.

So far, teachers and students are noticing changes, not only in happiness classes, but also in other classes. According to one teacher, he feels that “students are becoming more inquisitive and are asking questions…the happiness class removes the hesitation of the students. The happiness class has improved the student-teacher relationship, so when it comes to other subjects, students are more comfortable opening up in class.” Students are also recognizing a change, especially when it comes to mindfulness activities, similar to the one described above—“it makes me feel different…my mind gets refreshed, and it helps me concentrate on the particular subject even if I am not interested.”

Despite the positive anecdotes, the happiness curriculum raises many more questions than answers for the government: “What kind of questions should we be asking? What can we expect to achieve with the curriculum, and can the approach achieve it? How effectively is the curriculum being followed? Are there differences between students who learn this curriculum and who don’t? Are there changes happening in the happiness classes compared to the other classes? Is that behavior transferring to other aspects of students’ lives?” Although we may not learn the answers to all of these questions, everyone involved views it as a long-term approach that will take much longer than a year or two to see changes. This project is an opportunity to learn about what works well and what does not, so that improvements can be made along the way.

Note: Vishal Talreja is co-founder and Sreehari Ravindranath is associate director – research and impact of Dream A Dream Foundation, which provides financial support for Brookings.

We would like to thank Swati Chaurasia, Amit Kumar Sharma, and Khushboo Singh from Dream a Dream and Aynur Sahin from the Brookings Institution for their contributions to this blog.

       

India faces considerable education challenges: More than half of children are unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10, and disparities in learning levels persist between states and between the poorest and wealthiest children.

But, with a flourishing social enterprise ecosystem and an appetite among NGOs and policymakers for testing new solutions, India is playing a leading role in its use of innovative financing for development. One such innovative tool is an impact bond, a type of outcome-based financing structure where upfront capital is given to service providers by investors. While evidence on outcome-based financing in education—and impact bonds specifically—is still emerging, there are key lessons to be drawn for the application of such tools to education in India.

Impact bonds in India

Three impact bonds have been contracted in India to date, with two in the education sector. In the first—the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond (DIB)—the UBS Optimus Foundation provided upfront capital to Educate Girls to get out-of-school girls into the classroom and improve learning outcomes for boys and girls. After three years, the DIB had overachieved its enrollment and learning targets, and the investment was repaid by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). See Table 1 for more details.

Table 1: Educate Girls DIB

The second project in education, the Quality Education India (QEI) DIB brings together four service providers—Gyan Shala, Kaivalya Education Foundation, the Society for All Round Development, and Educational Initiatives (Mindspark)/Pratham Infotech Foundation—to implement a range of interventions with the goal of improving learning outcomes over a four-year period through 2022. UBS Optimus Foundation provided upfront capital for the interventions, and if metrics are successfully achieved, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, together with a group of outcome funders convened by the British Asian Trust, will pay for the outcomes. See Table 2 for more details.

Table 2: Quality Education India DIB

The potential of impact bonds

For stakeholders interested in using impact bonds to solve education challenges in India, the evidence suggests that the motivation for using the tool should be carefully considered. For instance, impact bonds seem to be most suitable to services that are preventative in nature, have a strong need for adaptation to individual needs, and result in easily measured but meaningful outcomes.

Thus far globally, impact bonds have focused on building quality in existing education systems and targeting services to specific groups, rather than being used broadly for the provision of basic education. This is partly a reflection of the early stage of the impact bond market: Many existing deals have focused on testing the model and building knowledge. However, it also suggests that the most appropriate programs for impact bond financing are not experimental programs without an evidence base (since these will likely be unappealing to investors) nor well-established programs with demonstrated outcomes (since outcome funders may just want to pay for these outright). Rather, they are something in between, where there is enough risk or capacity-building needed to justify the engagement and repayment of investors. Ensuring that interventions effectively target the population in need will be crucial in the design phase, and further research will be needed to understand the costs and benefits of the tool.

Three factors will play an important role in the growth of outcome-based financing for education in India. Already these factors have been important for the Educate Girls DIB and the QEI DIB. In terms of the first factor—ready and able education providers—a landscape analysis of the service provider market in India for the QEI DIB found that some organizations were not open to adapting existing program models—one of the key hypothesized advantages of outcome-based contracting. As a result of the scoping of service providers, one of the most interesting features about the QEI DIB is the selection of four service providers offering different interventions. With respect to the second factor—the potential for technology to facilitate data collection—the Educate Girls DIB used a digital data dashboard to provide performance insights; the QEI DIB will include the delivery of Mindspark, a computer-based adaptive learning software, which offers real-time performance data to teachers. Finally, considering the third factor—government engagement—while the government has not yet played the role of outcome funder, the government was engaged with both the Educate Girls and QEI DIBs, with MOUs signed to provide access to government schools. Further engagement of government could mean greater scale and sustainability of outcome-based financing in India.

The report

This study seeks to place the existing education impact bonds in the context of the Indian education landscape, and to investigate the overall potential and limitations of outcome-based financing for education in India. While there is unlikely to be one solution to India’s education challenges, impact bonds and outcome-based financing offer the opportunity to focus financing on impact, to promote the most effective education interventions and service providers, and to reinforce decisionmaking around data and evidence.

DOWNLOAD THE STUDY>>

       

Just back from Southeast Asia, Senior Fellow Jonathan Stromseth reports on the outcomes from the annual ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) summit, including the continued delay of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, China’s economic influence in the region, and how the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions are being perceived in the region.

Related material:

• Don’t make us choose: Southeast Asia in the throes of US-China rivalry

Listen to Brookings podcasts here, on Apple or on Google podcasts, send email feedback to bcp@brookings.edu, and follow us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

Thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo, Chris McKenna, Fred Dews, and Camilo Ramirez for their support.

The Current is part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

       

There are people who influence you and there is the person who changes your life. For me, that person was Steve Cohen. From the first time I spoke with him on the phone in 1993 about a story I was writing for India Today (where I worked then), to my entry into the graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to him inviting me to write a book with him, Steve shaped my life for a quarter-century. I even met my wife, Elana Mintz, at Brookings after Steve offered me a job there.

None of this is extraordinary; almost everyone who met Steve has a story about his generosities both big and small. From the gift of a book — or five — to the career-defining visiting fellowship at the University of Illinois or Brookings, Steve was known for inviting people to new opportunities. In the process, he built institutions and seeded the sub-field of South Asian security studies in the United States, not only with his own work but with the contributions of his students. His only American contemporary was Raju Thomas at Marquette University. Steve left us a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth, depth, and volume.

Others have written about Steve’s institution-building and generosity, so I want to emphasize his contribution to his original discipline of political science. It is important to highlight this contribution because Steve was himself disappointed at the ahistorical turn political science had taken starting around the late 1980s. The push in political science toward quantitative analysis was part of the reason Steve left the political science department at the University of Illinois to come to Brookings to launch the India Project in 1998.

Steve’s early books on the Indian and Pakistani armies are widely viewed as his most influential contributions, but it is worth noting their theoretical impact. When Steve published “The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation” in 1971, there were, at the time, two dominant ways in which political scientists thought about third-world armies. Samuel Huntington held one side of the debate — he argued that the professional military in the developing world was the one institution that was able to preserve political order in the face of mounting and chaos-producing popular demands. At the other end of the debate, Samuel Finer and Alfred Stepan argued that military professionalism was leading to coups, militarism, and fascism.

Steve’s representation of the Indian army provided a third model that saw professional militaries as having a nation-building role that did not include grabbing power.

The significance of this thinking became more evident when many new democracies recast their view in line with Steve’s argument, to focus on making the officer corps representative of the population and to see clearly the tradeoffs between operational freedoms and political subservience. The U.S. Department of Defense’s International Military Exchange and Training (IMET) program curricula on civil-military relations generally invoked Huntington to make this point, but Steve’s book showed how this was done in one major developing-world army. Steve’s thesis was closer to that of military sociologist Morris Janowitz, who saw convergence between the army and the nation, where Huntington had highlighted the difference between “Main Street” and “West Point.” Today, there are many countries, from Indonesia to Brazil, that avow this third model. Most interestingly, the Pakistani army seems to have internalized these lessons, even though it has not followed them.

As is well-known, Steve was denied a research visa to India through the 1970s, but General Zia-ul Haq of Pakistan had read his “Indian Army” book and invited him to write a similar analysis of his organization. Steve’s “The Pakistan Army” book was the first in-depth analysis of Pakistan’s army as an institution, and the stresses he identified in the book remain in place to this day. He was among the first to talk about Islamization of that army as a factor in its behavior. This raised the obvious larger question about the compatibility of religion with modern military organization. Elsewhere in the Islamic world — including in Turkey, Algeria, and Egypt — the character of the military has been at the center of the religion-secularist debate. Zia banned the book after its publication.

Steve’s move to Brookings in 1998 was prescient. India had just tested nuclear weapons. The Kargil War followed in 1999, and by the time the September 11 attacks occurred, South Asia and South Asian expertise was at the center of American foreign policy. After almost two decades of decline in regional studies, the return of policy attention to South Asia brought resources and renewed focus on the importance of regional studies.

Steve’s next two books, “India: Emerging Power” and “The Idea of Pakistan,” have been classified as policy works, but their theoretical contributions are significant as well. The India book was an examination of the relationship between economic, political, and military power, and the domestic processes that enable societies to translate economic might into political and military power. The role of domestic institutions in the making of foreign policy and military power remains an enduring puzzle in political science. In India’s case, the country appears to have reversed the causal direction of the economic and military power relationship such that its demonstration of military power — in the form of nuclear tests — ignited greater economic growth. But it came at the cost of political-military instability.

Steve contributed to the study of what is known in international relations as the stability-instability paradox by examining India-Pakistan crises from 1984 to 2002. This research was a collaboration with Indian scholar P.R. Chari and Pakistani scholar Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema.

Many others have written on the stability-instability paradox in South Asia, but what made Chari, Cheema, and Cohen important is their understanding of how the crises contributed to shaping the peace process, which was repeatedly restarted. It was also an examination of how American diplomacy shaped the South Asian conflict and carried important lessons about the limits of American power. In 2013, Steve wrote “Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum,” which analogized the India-Pakistan conflict to a hundred-year war, coming to the conclusion that the peace process between the two countries had essentially stagnated.

It has now been 13 years since another student of Steve’s, Swarna Rajagopalan, had the foresight to corral his students to produce a book in his honor, “Security and South Asia: Ideas, Institutions and Initiatives.” I wrote an extended essay on the Indian army and its struggle to change. Steve joked that he wasn’t ready to retire, and asked me to join a book project on India’s military modernization. In 2010, Brookings published “Arming Without Aiming,” in which we identified India’s strategic restraint — a concept hitherto applied mainly to the United States — as a determinant of the country’s efforts to generate military power. Whether this restraint remains in place now is a central question about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new India, and it remains relevant to the general theory of power transitions and war-making.

I was Steve’s last graduate student at Illinois, and perhaps because of it, I stayed on longer than all the others. I remained in the Washington, D.C. region and our lives intertwined from the mundane to the life-changing. He was at my wedding and he was part of my children’s lives from their births. He came to bagel brunches but passed on the smoked salmon — Steve hated fish — and after each visit, Steve’s wife, Bobby, would write us incredible handwritten notes that picked one conversation to highlight, or offered the encouragement we needed as new parents.

As he became ill over the last few years, I was fortunate to be close and able to visit, and inevitably he called if a South Asian visitor we knew in common was passing through. The last time I saw him was in September, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Steve and Bobby had recently moved. He was clear enough in mind and spirit to wear his lopsided grin as if asking what all the fuss was about. I read him letters from common friends. I gave him an update on the Indian government’s abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir. I could see his brain engaging as it used to. He had already predicted a century of conflict between India and Pakistan and, if war prediction is a central purpose of international relations theory, Steve Cohen had one part of the world right.

       

Stephen P. Cohen, who passed away this week at the age of 83, was an institution unto himself. Raised in Chicago when local politics was a rough-and-tumble affair and educated in Wisconsin in the midst of a civil rights movement and social upheaval, he brought both cynicism and idealism to the study of war and peace in South Asia. His first forays to India as both a graduate student and young academic were difficult. Delays in attaining a visa meant that he was forced to wait in London, where he trudged through government archives and interviewed former British military commanders in India, such as Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck. With his young family (he is survived by his wife Roberta, four sons, and two daughters), Steve traveled through India, picked up some Hindi in the Himalayan foothills, and produced a socio-political history of the Indian army. This proved the start of a personal journey, but one that would touch the lives and careers of countless others.

The first couple of decades after 1947 had witnessed a considerable growth in contemporary India studies in the United States. But colored by the era’s geopolitics, specializing in India or South Asia become a losing career proposition among many American academics and policymakers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While a lot of his contemporaries moved on to other issues or areas, Steve (along with only a handful of others, such as Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph) stuck it out. In the 1970s, partly frustrated by the difficulty of conducting research in India, given the growing suspicions of American scholars, he produced a book on Pakistan’s army. West of the Radcliffe Line, Steve received considerable access, including to General Zia ul-Haq himself. (He would later joke that Zia did him the ultimate favor: By banning his book, the dictator ensured it would become a bestseller on the black market.)

He would later joke that Zia did him the ultimate favor: By banning his book, the dictator ensured it would become a bestseller on the black market.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Steve dedicated himself to scholarship centered at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was a tenured professor. He recruited and mentored a large number of doctoral students, including from India and Pakistan. Many of them now occupy top academic positions at leading universities around the world. He also devoted a lot of time to nuclear disarmament studies and initiatives, during a period when India and Pakistan were engaged in furtive efforts to develop their nuclear weapon capabilities. In the 1980s, he spent two years on the policy planning staff of the U.S. State Department, then under the inimitable George P. Shultz. It was an experience that enhanced his standing as an influential voice within policymaking circles, but also instilled a certain irreverence towards Washington.

A decade later, after India and Pakistan tested their nuclear weapons in 1998, Steve found himself in high demand and became a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. While many others in his position would have treated this as a post-academic sinecure, Steve launched a second career. Within five years, he produced two books — “India: Emerging Power” and “The Idea of Pakistan” — which became basic introductions to the two countries for U.S. policymakers. In time, however, his focus remained on resolving India-Pakistan tensions, about which he stayed permanently pessimistic (reflected in the title of his book, “Shooting for a Century“). To this end, he produced “Four Crises and a Peace Process” with one Indian and one Pakistani co-author, helped foster a Regional Centre for Strategic Studies in neutral Sri Lanka, and established a number of training and study programs for young Indian and Pakistani security scholars to interact with one another. His skepticism of Indian military modernization efforts found voice in his book “Arming without Aiming” (with Sunil Dasgupta). And throughout this period, he remained incredibly well-connected in the region, and particularly in Pakistan with the country’s military leadership and civilian politicians from all major parties. On her last visit to the United States just two months before her assassination, Benazir Bhutto went out of her way to seek an appointment with him.

Steve’s early scholarship has been built upon by others, such as Steven Wilkinson’s work on the Indian Army and Shuja Nawaz on Pakistan’s. But he will always be remembered for his eagerness to mentor young scholars, and not just his students and assistants. I was but one of several research assistants at Brookings — Dinshaw Mistry, Sunil Dasgupta, Tanvi Madan, Anit Mukherjee, and Constantino Xavier being others — to have been fortunate to have worked under him. Such an intense apprenticeship enabled us to know Steve not just as a scholar but as a human being. His passion for jazz, tennis, fast cars, Mac computers, and the Chicago Bears was matched only by a wry sense of humor (a running joke was his being mistaken for Stephen F. Cohen, the Marxist scholar of Russia, or the other Stephen P. Cohen, a Middle East expert). He will be deeply missed but also celebrated for his personal warmth and loyalty to countless beneficiaries in India, Pakistan, the United States, and around the world.