Yugank is Professor – Public Policy at FLAME University. He is the founder director of Centre for Knowledge Alternatives at the University, where he is developing large-scale documentation of district-level statistics and cultures across India.

Earlier, he  worked in O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) as one of its founding faculty members, helping establish the University, and particularly its law school. Prior to that, he has worked with a major private bank, consulting its rural infrastructure projects in eastern India. 

His research interests include regulation, law and development, institutional economics, knowledge systems, informal markets and psephology. His research has been published in high-impact journals. He is also a reviewer in several of them.  He also regularly contributes to national dailies and other popular fora as well. 

He enjoys teaching interdisciplinary subjects, including public policy, new institutional economics, law and economics, futures studies and ethics. 

Yugank engages with the government on public policy issues regularly. He is Member, National Education Policy (NEP) Steering Committee, government of Maharashtra, Regional Advisory Council Member, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, government of India, and Consultant, Procurement Research Cell, AJ National Institute of Financial Management. He sits on the academic board of the Indian School of Public Policy, which he helped set up. Recently, he also co-founded a philanthropic, crowdfunded school in rural, western UP.

Recent Journal Articles

• A theory of legal apparitions:regulation and escape in Indian divorces. International Journal of Law in Context 19(3): 1-19. 


• Informal land leasing in rural India persists because it is credible, Land Use Policy 120, 106299 (with P. Choudhury and R. Ghosh)


• Public Procurement during the Pandemic: Experience of India and China, Journal of Public Procurement. (2022).


• Why do Informal Markets remain Informal? Lessons from an Indian Footwear Cluster, Journal of Evolutionary Economics 31(2): 639-659 (2021) (with Klaus Heine)


• Oliver Williamson: the man who reduced transaction costs of economics, Economic and Political Weekly 55(28-29): 22-25 (2020) (with R. Ghosh)


• Telecom Woes in India: What does it tell us about regulation, Economic and Political Weekly 55(1): 16-21 (2020). 


• Of Modernity, House Prices and Suspending Singularity of Time, Journal of Human Values 26(1): 1-14 (2020)


• Responsibilization through regulatory intermediary in informal markets – Examining the informal prostitution market in India, Regulation & Governance 14(1): 1-18 (2020)


• How governments promote monopolies: Public procurement in India, American Journal of Economics and Sociology Vol. 78(5): 1135-1169 (2019)


• The Desirability of one-nation, one-election in India, Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies 44(1-2): 110-120 (2019) (with A. Kaushik). 


• The coal mine mafia of India: A mirror of corporate power, American Journal of Economics and Sociology 77(2): 541-574 (2018).


• Examining Electoral Data: An Inquiry into People’s Preferences of Communist Parties in West Bengal and Kerala, Economic and Political Weekly 53 (36): 38-46 (2018) (with A. Kaushik)


• Are Small Firms Willing to Pay for Improved Power Supply? Evidence from a Contingent Valuation Study in India, Energy Policy 109: 659-665 (2017) (with Ranjan Ghosh et. al.)


• Informal Institutions in the Regulatory State: the Case of Bureaucracy in India, Law and Development Review 10(1): 147-177 (2017)


• Institutional Costs of International Space Law, Journal of Space Law 41: 57-92 (2017) (with S.G. Sreejith)

Select Book Chapters

• We Shall Not Cease from Exploration: Why Does IP Protection Harm Traditional Cultural Expressions, in Creation | Innovation | Markets – Festschrift Reto M. Hilty by Thouvenin, F. et. al. (eds.) Springer Nature (2023-forthcoming) 


• Of entrepreneurs, knowledge commons and informal markets: the case of informal trade credit in India, in ‘Governing Market as Knowledge Commons,’ by Pavel Kuchar and Erwin Dekker (eds.) Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)


• Of footwear clusters, trade credit and institutional tenacity, in ‘Invisible Institutionalisms. Collective reflections on the shadows of legal globalization,’ by Sara Dezalay and Swethaa Balakrishnen (eds.) Hart Publishing (2021)


• Neighbourhood in Space-Time: A case of House Prices and Latent Aspirations, in ‘Neighbourhoods in Urban India’, by Sadan Jha, D.N. Pathak and A.K. Das (eds.) Bloomsbury (2020) 


• The Enchantment of Urbanization: Closer look at market’s narrative in Indian cities, in ‘Investigating Developmentalism: Notions of Development in the Social Sphere,’ by D.N. Pathak and A.K. Das (eds.) Palgrave Macmillan (2019).


• The Informal Domestic Workers in India: A Descriptive Mapping of NSSO Data, in ‘Recognition of the Rights of Domestic Workers in India: Challenges and the Way Forward’, by U. Mahanta and I. Gupta (eds.) Springer (2018) (with Rakesh Kumar).


• The Phoenix of Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education, in ‘The Future of Indian Universities: Comparative and International Perspectives,’ by C. Raj Kumar et al (eds.) New Delhi: Oxford University Press (2017).


• A Short Note on Concept of Validity in Informal Markets, in ‘Legal Validity and Soft Law’, Jaap Hage et. al. (Eds.). Springer (2017) (with Pauline Westerman)


• Ethics and Governance in Climate Change Debate: Need for institutional shift from Nation-States to Individuals, in Hugh Breakey et al (ed.), Ethical Values and Integrity of the Climate Change Regime. Ashgate (2015)

Books

• Who Moved my Vote: Digging through Indian Electoral Data (with A.K. Kaushik). Westland Publishers, 2022.

Book Reviews

• Maurizio Catino’s Mafia Organizations: The Visible Hand of Criminal Enterprise, American Journal of Sociology 126(1): 138-140


• Ramchandra Guha’s Gandhi: The years that changed the world, 1914-1948,  Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2019) 


• Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2016

Select Newspaper Op-eds

• Karnataka’s electoral contest is closer than seat shares suggest, Mint, May 2023


• Judicial Delays and the need for intervention at local levels, Mint, May 2022


• Winds of change in urban India that demand close investigation, Live Mint, March 2022


• Far too many small businesses in India stumble on loan eligibility, Live Mint, January 2022


• What our Constituent Assembly Debates reveal of a vital process, Live Mint, November 2021


• A policy to regulate coaching centres, Hindu, June 2019


• Dear government, can we have some real liberalization, Deccan Herald, July 2018


• Filmy Family Business, Indian Express, September 2017 (with 


• Hindus and Muslims: the True Picture of Divorce, Live Mint July 2017


• Access to Excellence. the Hindu, June 2017


• BJP in 2017 is a worthier winner than SP in 2012. Quartz, March, 2017.


• The Algebra of UP Assembly Elections, Live Mint, March, 2017. 


• The Ivy League’s dark history shows it is not easy to reject charity that involves dirty money. Quartz, February 2017.


• Enriched by the Outsider. Indian Express, February 2017


• Govt., give me a tax bargain. DNA, December 2016


• The air we breathe: if not now, then when? Live Mint, November 2016 


• Shadow Education, Indian Express, June 2016


• Group Captive Plants can solve Industrial Units’ Power Woes, Deccan Herald, March 2016


• The Algebra of Bihar Assembly, Live Mint, 16 November 2015 


• For Pleasure or For Profit: The Promises and Perils of Art Markets, the Caravan, August 2015.