Accountability and responsibility
Accountability of public institutions and employees is deemed important for them to function for the common good. In this post, Drèze and Sen argue that accountability is only one aspect of a much br...
-
Jean Drèze
Amartya Sen
13 March, 2025
- Perspectives
How immigration policy uncertainty affects labour markets
President Trump’s re-election has reignited debate over H-1B visa policies, a temporary high-skill work visa programme wherein 70% of visas are held by Indians. Analysing jobs data from India from t...
-
Ritam Chaurey
Kanika Mahajan
Shekhar Tomar
08 January, 2025
- Articles
Fiscal transfers and natural calamities: Does political alignment matter?
Fiscal transfers from the central government serve as an important mechanism for state governments to mitigate adverse impacts of extreme climate events. This article demonstrates that higher allocati...
-
K. S. Kavi Kumar
Anubhab Pattanayak
14 November, 2024
- Articles
Ujjwala 2.0: What should be done next?
Stopping the use of wood and other solid fuels for cooking and other household uses is crucial to mitigating air pollution and its staggeringly high health impacts in India. In 2016, the government an...
-
Ambuj Sagar
Alok Tripathi
22 July, 2019
- Articles
Using mobiles to improve governance
Measuring how well major public programmes are implemented remains a core governance challenge. With the increasing mobile-phone penetration in the country, Muralidharan, Niehaus, Sukhtankar, and Weav...
-
Karthik Muralidharan
Paul Niehaus
Sandip Sukhtankar
Jeffrey Weaver
26 June, 2019
- Perspectives
India’s emerging crisis of representation
Article 81 of the Indian Constitution requires that each state receive Lok Sabha seats in proportion to its population and allocate those seats to constituencies of roughly equal size. However, the ch...
-
Jamie Hintson
Milan Vaishnav
29 May, 2019
- Articles
Power to the people: The impact of political report cards in India
How do Indian voters react to information on the qualifications and performance of politicians?
-
Abhijit Banerjee
27 May, 2019
- Podcasts
Criminal politicians and informed voting in India
In India, 9% of legislators face criminal charges. Could voter information and coordination improve the country’s political representation?
-
Yusuf Neggers
23 May, 2019
- Podcasts
Curbing leakage in public programmes: Evidence from Direct Benefit Transfer policy for LPG subsidies
Many developing countries subsidise access to essential commodities with in-kind transfer programmes, where beneficiaries receive goods at subsidised prices while non-beneficiaries have to pay the mar...
-
Prabhat Barnwal
06 May, 2019
- Articles
Do roads bring votes in rural India?
A large-scale rural roads programme in India has provided access to over two-third of villages that lacked a paved road in 2001. Do citizens reward incumbent governments electorally for these improvem...
-
Tanushree Goyal
26 April, 2019
- Articles
Oral democracy
Critical scrutiny of the challenges of electoral democracy including elite capture, corruption, and patronage has led to a revival of the idea of direct democracy – giving power directly to groups o...
-
Vijayendra Rao
Paromita Sanyal
24 April, 2019
- Articles
Are transparency and accountability enough? Open corruption and why it exists
While India’s federal anti-corruption ombudsmen have just taken up their work, awareness of the complexity of corruption is growing. This article studies whether highly accountable Indian village co...
-
Dahyeon Jeong
Ajay Shenoy
Laura Zimmermann
18 April, 2019
- Articles
Should civil servants be allowed to serve in their home areas?
Bureaucrats form an essential part of State capacity. Should they be allowed to serve in their home areas? This article finds that Indian Administrative Service officers assigned to their home states ...
-
Marianne Bertrand
Robin Burgess
Guo Xu
08 April, 2019
- Articles
Strengthen MNREGS to support the rural economy
India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) has generated a lot of controversy about its effectiveness as a safety net designed to benefit landless rural households. M...
-
Karthik Muralidharan
Paul Niehaus
Sandip Sukhtankar
22 March, 2019
- Perspectives
Rethinking cadre allocation procedures in civil services
The allocation procedure of All-India Services’ officers to states is an important aspect of personnel administration in the public sector. This article shows that a change in allocation policy in 2...
-
Ashutosh Thakur
18 March, 2019
- Articles
Twitter feed
Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Governance Posts
Unique Health Identification and Aadhaar: A case for mandatory linkage
As part of the Digital India initiative, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) issues a Unique Health Identification (UHID) number to each patient, which documents their entire journey in th...
Mudit Kapoor
23 December, 2016
- Perspectives
Caste dominance in rural India: Cause and effect
Rural India remains a caste-based society. This column explores why caste continues to play such an important role and what the effects are. It argues that trade and agricultural productivity suffer, ...
Siwan Anderson
16 August, 2012
- Articles
The digital dream: Upskilling India for the future
While the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace at which technology is becoming commonplace in our lives, it has also exposed a stark digital divide, leaving a large proportion of India’s popul...
Venugopal Mothkoor
Fatima Mumtaz
23 March, 2021
- Perspectives