 Well, wishful thinking is not sound public policy, said John Lomborg, a Danish author and president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. He said it so right. Every piece and element of public policy must have a sound reason and legitimate objective. In spite of abundance in quality of any language and accuracy of its linguistic use, language has an enormous potential and scope for confusion, lack of clarity, equivocality, imprecision and indeed garbage. And along with visuals, it has incredible possibility for making good for making and conveying, you know, horrifying degrees of misleading information and impressions. Thus, it is vital that the laws that we draft ought to be very accurate and precise, especially for those set of individuals who are confident in continuously planning to manhandle the aims and objectives of the law. Our courts are known to be courts of law, but we would like that they become increasingly courts of equity and justice. Let us discuss the stages of public policy. Or should I say, let us discuss the stages of public policy making. Well, public policy, as you all know, would include laws as well as subordinate legislation, rules, regulations, notifications, cabinet decisions, circulars, press notes, etc. There are numerous distinctive models to clarify the approach in formulating and introducing a public policy, but one of the most seasoned and most common approaches to the ponder of policy making determines from the early work of Harold Laswell. He was a leading American political scientist and communications theorist. He was a PhD student at the University of Chicago and he was a professor of law at Yale University. This American political scientist was the first to have taken into account and analyzed policy as a process that is as a set of phenomena organized in time led by a number of specific and self-induced mechanisms. The model that he helped build is usually known as the stages model of policy, since it separates policy making into its component steps or stages and analyzes each intern. The original version of the model included seven stages, though more recent versions have reduced the process to fewer steps, varying between four and six, I would say. Generally speaking, such stages include, let me take up stage one first briefly, stage one would be recognizing the issues or matters or challenges through research or demands for action which need to be addressed and resolved or attended to by virtue of bringing out of a new public policy. Stage two is the plan setting or agenda setting or converging on particular problems slash issues. The fundamental component here is that an issue must exist that's called to the consideration of the government or legislature as the case may be. For instance, when crime against women and children became rampant in India, the government and parliament brought about a new law called POKSO and corresponding amendments were also brought about in the Indian Penal Code. In stage three, what happens is the detailing of approach recommendations, their head start in advancement by policy planning organizations for instance and the officials or other sort of agencies, public agencies or government agencies or other authoritative branches of government. This detailed approach implies coming up with a methodology or tactic to comprehending the issue at hand. Legal or expert opinions can also be sought in this process for endorsements or clarifications. Conflicting recommendations can also be received from different stakeholders. It depends whether a political consensus can be obtained from different ideological groups and parties or not and whether government goes ahead notwithstanding the consensus or it builds the universal acceptability, it's up to the government. This is the stage of passing or issuance of the public policy. Once stage three is over, stage four comes into play where the acceptance and conveyance of validity of policy happens by way of conduct of executive actions of the government, stakeholders, political parties and so on. In stage five, the execution and implementation of public policies takes a shape through executive and administrative machinery. It need to be a situation hard, it need not be a situation sorry beg your pardon, situation hard and fast that the implementation or carrying out of policy is done by same institutions or agencies who had actually formulated and adopted it. In any case, effective realization of public policy goals depends on the entry cases of the policy concerned, synchronization between those setting the policy into force and the ones required to comply with it. Now moving on to the final stage. This is the evaluation stage and I consider it the most important stage though it is ignored in most of the developing nations. Appraisal of policies performance and effect is fundamental. Evaluation implies ascertaining how good a policy is doing which was brought about. There are several measures to assess success and failure of a public policy. I will cover that in one of my succeeding discourses. For today, I am closing my lecture at the stages of public policy.