“I wanted to do a PhD and combine my backgrounds in economics, law, and public policy. I don't think there's any department in the world that facilitates that as well as the Blavatnik School. I was absolutely thrilled when I got in.”
Utkarsh Saxena is a DPhil in Public Policy candidate, whose research uses techniques from development economics to examine the impact of laws, court judgements and weak court capacity in India.
Throughout his career, Utkarsh has wrestled with two parallel interests – economics and law. Having graduated with bachelor’s degrees in both subjects from the University of Delhi, he began his career as a legal clerk in the Supreme Court of India. A Master of Laws at Harvard Law School followed, preparing Utkarsh to return to the Supreme Court as an attorney. There he worked on issues spanning juvenile justice, the death penalty, sexual assault cases, and constitutional issues.
“At that stage the plan was to pursue a legal path. But because I had the background in economics too, I was also constantly thinking about the systemic policy-level issues I encountered in my work.”
On the side of his legal work, Utkarsh undertook consultancies at the Ministries of Law and Civil Aviation, and was later offered a year-long post as a consultant to India’s Chief Economist in the Ministry of Finance. The role reignited his passion for economic policy, propelling him away from a traditional legal career and back to Harvard for a second master’s in International Development Economics at the Kennedy School.
While gaining valuable experience of how the private sector and government interact in policy work at Boston Consulting Group, Utkarsh applied for the Blavatnik School’s DPhil in pursuit of the interdisciplinary approach he craved. Since October 2022, Utkarsh has been working with Karthik Ramanna and Julien Labonne at the School and Simon Quinn at Oxford’s Department of Economics on research applying traditional methods in economics and development to legal settings.
Around the same time that he started the programme, another project emerged for Utkarsh, which married elements from his personal and professional worlds.
“Because I regularly appeared in civil rights cases as a lawyer, I try to keep taking up litigations on the side. This one, which started last year, is a bit more personal. My partner and I met at university in 2008 and have been in a relationship for 15 years now. For legal, social and personal reasons we decided we wanted to move a petition in court for marriage equality.”
Utkarsh and his partner, Ananya Kotia, filed the petition in December 2022 which was one of several submitted by LGBTQ+ couples in India. He’s since been balancing the demands of the legal work for the petition - and perhaps the even bigger challenge of changing hearts and minds in India - with the intense workload of the DPhil programme.
The flexibility afforded by the DPhil to work intensively in spurts so that he could fulfil the commitments of both projects was a huge benefit when he had to go back to India to appear in court. Now that arguments have been heard, the court is expected to make a decision in summer 2023, leaving Utkarsh with more time to focus on his research. Although the DPhil programme can at times be solitary, Kotia, his partner, is also an economist and can share in the highs and lows of his research as well as the petition.
“Although it’s not a marriage yet, we always describe our relationship as an intellectual marriage as well as a romantic one. Because we understand each other’s professional aspirations so well, we’re each other’s biggest cheerleaders. I’m far more ambitious about my partner than I am about myself.”
In spite of the whirlwind of litigation, media outreach and travel between India and the UK for the case, Utkarsh has still managed to settle in well to Oxford, just a short journey away from his partner who is finishing his PhD at the London School of Economics. Utkarsh pinches himself each time he walks into St John’s College and has revelled in the Blavatnik School’s tight-knit community.
Whatever the outcome later in summer, Utkarsh isn’t planning to miss out on any opportunities to strengthen his DPhil research; from September he’ll be back in the US for a research visit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Professor Esther Duflo.
June 2023.