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Tag Search: “public service delivery”

PDS, National Food Security Act, and Covid-19

Introduced in 2013, the National Food Security Act (NFSA) brought about fundamental reforms in the public distribution system (PDS) and most importantly, declared a legal ‘right to food’. Based on a p...

  • Articles

The changing demand for welfare in rural Pakistan

The proliferation of cash transfer programmes in developing countries has raised concern regarding a crowding-out effect on citizens' demands for investment in universal public services. Based on a ho...

  • Articles

The Covid-19 crisis and food security

India’s national lockdown in 2020, imposed to contain the spread of Covid-19, threw millions of people out of work and sharply reduced earnings for those who remained employed. Based on data from mult...

  • Perspectives

Examining district-level performance of Ujjwala: The case of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand

Launched in 2016, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) aims to encourage the adoption of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking. Using National Sample Survey data for 2014 and 2017, this article ex...

  • Articles

Escaping the subsidy-quality trap in India’s retail electricity market

Cross-subsidies in retail electricity tariffs leave distribution utilities with neither the incentive nor the capital to improve reliability, particularly for their most subsidised consumers. Using bi...

  • Articles

Energy access for marginalised communities: Evidence from rural India

While overall energy access of Indian households has improved rapidly over the past decade, access to clean fuel is still low as compared to electricity. Besides, social structures and hierarchies con...

  • Articles

Covid-19: How well are government schemes supporting Bihar’s vulnerable populations?

The immediate adverse impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown was visibly greater for migrant workers and their households, whose ability to access government schemes in their villages...

  • Notes from the Field

Budget 2021-22: Over-reliance on infrastructure investment to spur growth?

Commenting on the strong infrastructure push in the 2021-22 Budget, Sarmistha Pal argues that an emphasis on investment in infrastructure may not necessarily bring India out of the current economic re...

  • Perspectives

An assessment of policy performance under the current regime

Commenting on the recent policy paper by Subramanian-Felman, Maitreesh Ghatak discusses why – looking at the same numbers – he would tend to be less generous in his grades for the performance of polic...

  • Perspectives

“New Welfarism”: Old wine, new bottles?

Commenting on the recent policy paper by Subramanian and Felman, R Nagaraj contends that the authors imaginative re-branding of the erstwhile ‘populist schemes’ as “New Welfarism of the Right” is an e...

  • Perspectives

Diversity and public goods: Why the geographical unit of analysis matters

Research has shown that regions with higher caste diversity have lower share of villages with essential public goods. This article challenges this finding and shows that empirical models estimated at ...

  • Articles

Balancing corruption and exclusion: Comment on the response

The role of Aadhaar in reducing corruption in the PDS has been highly controversial. In a recent I4I article, Muralidharan et al. summarised the insights of their study of Aadhaar-based biometric auth...

  • Perspectives