The All India Economics Students' Meet 2005

I just got back from the meet a couple of days back, and I am pleased to say that I have survived the experience successfully. Our team won the 2nd prize in the Paper Presentation (our paper was a monograph on why the Employment Guarantee Act is a piece of crap). I also won a prize for the best question asked in the same Paper Presentation.

I'll update this post to give more details, but I got to go now.

Ok, I delayed this a long time, but here's the version with slightly more detail:

• The organisation of the event was very good. The Hindu College guys took very good care of the participants, except for a little snafu with the accomodation.
• We presented a paper on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and were one of eight teams to do so. Our stand on the Act was that it is fundamentally unworkable, and the government has a hundred better things to do with our money. Six of the other eight teams presented paper that said (generally) that the Employment Guarantee is a fundamentally good concept, but the act has been diluted by bureaucrats (the Jean Dreze viewpoint). The eighth team, St. Xavier's Calcutta, was, like us critical of the NREGA. They made some really strong points, and in the end beat us to the top spot.
• I also won a prize for the best question asked (by a member of the audience) to a team making a paper presentation. The team in question was Ramjas College, who were presenting a paper on Energy Security. They said that India can rely on pipelines such as the Iran-Pak-India pipeline or the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline for energy security. My question was that since both pipelines pass through conflict zones (the Iran line through Baluchistan and the BTC line through Nagorno-Karabakh), how can India depend on staedy supplies through them. The guy tried to dodge the question with some crap about Musharraf's guarantee about regular supplies, but was unable to answer my point about Nagorno Karabakh (I strongly suspect I got the prize just for knowing that name). As it turns out, the BTC pipeline does not go through Nagorno-Karabakh at all, in fact taking a significant detour to avoid the region.
• There was also an incident involving four girls, a three kilometer cycle rickshaw ride and a monkey, but I'm really pressed for time, so it must wait for another time, I guess.