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Governance

Building State capacity for accelerating development through effective governance

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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...

  • 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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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?

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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?

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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Recent Contributors

Maitreesh

Maitreesh Ghatak

London School of Economics

Karthik

Karthik Muralidharan

University of California, San Diego

Jean

Jean Drèze

Ranchi University; Delhi School of Economics

Amartya

Amartya Sen

Harvard University

Sabyasachi

Sabyasachi Das

Ahmedabad University

Souvik

Souvik Dutta

Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology

Soham

Soham Sahoo

Loughborough University and Indian Institute of Ma

Muneer

Muneer Kalliylil

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

View all Contributors

Most 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...

  • 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, ...

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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...

  • Perspectives