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New ideas for fighting corruption in India

Do political parties matter for ethnic violence? The Congress and Hindu-Muslim riots in India

India has seen frequent violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims since independence. This column analyses an important yet largely overlooked driver of ethnic violence: the ruling political party at...

Doing Business in India: Myths and realities

Ahead of the global release of the 2018 edition of the World Bank Doing Business rankings, this column compares data from firm-level surveys conducted by the Bank and the IDFC Institute-NITI Aayog wi...

Governance and public service delivery in India

The International Growth Centre recently produced a synthesis paper (Afridi 2017) bringing together insights from its research on governance and public service delivery in India, over the past seven y...

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The need for police reform

The police in India are still mainly governed by the Police Act of 1861. In this article, Abhijit Banerjee, Professor of Economics at MIT, emphasises the need for police reform in order to check misu...

Is the MNREGA fund crunch making the programme clientelistic?

Fund allocation for MNREGA has seen a steady decline in real terms over the last few years. Analysing official MNREGA data along with survey data from Rajasthan, this column shows that in the face of...

Outlays to Outcomes: Understanding pathways to improving learning outcome

This project responds to a specific Government of Bihar request to assess the effectiveness of its "Mission Gunvatta" programme, which aimed at improving the learning outcomes of children attending el...

The political economy of data

Recent experiences, especially from Scandinavian countries, show that opening administrative data sources can substantially improve public policymaking. In this article, Pande and Blum contend that w...

The significance of local power structures in Bihar's coupon-based PDS

In 2007, Bihar introduced the coupon system in PDS to curb leakages at fair price shops. This column argues that even though the administrative logic of the coupon system is fundamentally sound, such...

Charting a course for the Indian economy

Karthik Muralidharan (Associate Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego) speaks with Arvind Subramanian (Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India) on a broad set of issues rang...

He is a criminal but he is our criminal: Criminally-accused politicians in India

The recent increase in the number of criminally-accused politicians elected to state assemblies has caused much furore in India. Despite the potentially important consequences and the widely divergent...

Elucidating avenues for corruption: Micronutrient fortification strategies in India’s Midday Meals Programme

Globally, iron deficiency is a leading cause of anaemia, a condition that is particularly harmful during early childhood, causing fatigue and slower physical and cognitive development with potentially...

Why numbers matter

The delayed and partial release of data from the ‘Rapid Survey on Children’ by the Indian government has given rise to questions and speculation. In this article, former bureaucrat V. Ramani disc...

PDS computerisation: What other states can learn from Kerala

Given the leakage in the Public Distribution System, Indian states are being encouraged to computerise their PDS. This column analyses Kerala’s experience with PDS computerisation and highlights me...

Do ruling coalition-affiliated MLAs bring more development to their constituencies?

Despite the dismantling of the License Raj in the 1990s, interaction with government officials remains an important impediment to doing business in India. This column analyses the role of politics in...

Citizens' trust in local politicians and implications for good governance

The new state of Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in June 2014, after a prolonged movement by the people of Telangana region for a separate state. Based on field experiments among citizens ...

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Most Popular Governance Posts

Do political parties matter for ethnic violence? The Congress and Hindu-Muslim riots in India

India has seen frequent violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims since independence. This column analyses an important yet largely overlooked driver of ethnic violence: the ruling political party at...

Podcast: Parikshit Ghosh speaks with Karl Ove Moene

There is a view that upsurge in inequality due to globalisation is leading to rising appeal of political platforms that promote inward-looking policies. In this podcast, I4I Editor Parikshit Ghosh (As...

New ideas for fighting corruption in India

Even as technological innovations have reduced petty bribery, it is clear that bigger forms of corruption are flourishing in India. In this post, Avinash Dixit and Ritika Mankar propose the formation ...