The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) announced today the launch of Carnegie India, a branch of the think tank which will open in New Delhi. The new think tank, which will open in April 2016, will be Carnegie's sixth international center. CEIP is headquartered in Washington, DC and has branches in Beijing, Beirut, Brussels, and Moscow.
C. Raja Mohan, a Nonresident Senior Associate at Carnegie since 2012, will serve as the founding director of Carnegie India. Shivnath Thukral, former group president of corporate branding and strategic initiatives at Essar, will serve as Carnegie India's Managing Director.
Carnegie India has been supported by Carnegie India's Founders Committee, a group of Indian and international donors co-chaired by former cabinet secretary and Indian ambassador to the US, Naresh Chandra, and former US Ambassador to India, Frank Wisner.
Others on Carnegie India's Founders Committee include: Carnegie Corporation of America, Shobhana Bhartia/HT Media, C.K. Birla, General Electric, Gilead Sciences, Chip & Cheryl Kaye/Warburg Pincus Foundation, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Sunil Mittal, The David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Saroj Poddar, G.M. Rao, Tata Sons Ltd., and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
Carnegie is not the first major US think tank to open a branch in India. Several years ago, the Brookings Institution opened a think tank in New Delhi, the same city where Carnegie's new think tank will be located.
India only has 192 think tanks according to the latest University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings. With a population of 1.25 billion, that means India has one think tank for every 6.5 million people. As a comparison, the US, with 1,830 think tanks and a population of around 320 million people, has one think tank for every 175,000 people.