Rahul Suresh Sapkal defended his EDLE thesis in October 2016. One of his chapters was called ‘To Conciliate or (not) to Conciliate: Empirical Evidence from Labour Disputes in India’.
Recently when the Government of India released its Economic Survey 2018, this paper which he wrote as an EDLE thesis chapter became national news: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/8142-cases-pending-in-mumbai-labour-courts-5050589/
Rahul commented:
At the time of writing my PhD thesis I was worried about how to ensure a labour court justice to tolling industrial labour class in India, when the existing system ain't certain. Under the supervision of Prof. Hans Bernd Schaefer and Prof. K R Shyam Sundar (who later become my co-author on almost every write up on Indian labour market), I en devour to write a chapter on this subject matter. It took more than one year to gather a data on labour disputes from two major labour courts in India. Though, I was bit slow in collecting the data, little nervous and running out of time to support my stay in Germany, I somehow succeed running the preliminary regression. Despite few initial disappointments on my part, Prof. Schaefer, Prof. Faure and Prof Motiram showed full confidence on my earlier empirical exercises. However after few years the paper got published in an edited volume, I was still in the game and kept collecting the data on labour courts in India. Finally, hard work pays off!!! Recently when the Government of India released its Economic Survey 2018, my paper which I wrote as an EDLE thesis chapter become national news.
Quality works takes times, but it indeed pays off well.
Rahul Suresh Sapkal is currently appointed as Assistant Professor in Economics at the Maharashtra National Law University in Mumbai.