The B.CLIP civic leadership programme featured in Open magazine

The B.CLIP civic leadership programme featured in Open magazine. The piece also features Takshashila Councillor Mukul Asher and quotes Takshashila's Pavan Srinath."In a tube-lit classroom filled to burst- ing point with about 66 adults across age groups, Mukul Asher, professor of public policy at National University of Singapore is explaining the idea of hidden taxes—taxes citizens pay because of the government’s inefficiency or short- sightedness. He argues that bribes paid to government employees are a tax; they are, after all, a payment made to a person who represents the government and are, more or less, compulsory. “Lower income groups are extremely highly taxed,” he says, “but the money they pay doesn’t go into government coffers.”..."The lesson is a crucial one for the students, all of whom are attending a Civic Leadership Incubator Program (BCLIP), created by the Bangalore Political Action Committee (BPAC) in partnership with the public policy think-tank Takshashila Institution. The programme aims to groom candidates for corporator positions in Bangalore’s 2015 municipal elections. As many as 62 per cent of the students come from political parties, and most of them intend to stand for elections. The rest do not have any experience in politics, but are here because they have a strong desire to improve governance and have already begun doing what they can."..."To tie together the interests of so many stakeholders while solving unprecedented engineering problems takes political imagination, says Pavan Srinath, a policy researcher from Takshashila Institution and a BCLIP instructor. “It is the task of a politician to provide the right incentives to each of them and pursue the larger public purpose. Our aim is to teach students to think in terms of interests and incentives.”Read the rest of the piece here.