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Tag Search: “public service delivery”

On the perils of embedded experiments

There is growing interest in ‘embedded experiments’, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they seem t...

  • Perspectives

Budget 2022-23: The elephants and the ostrich

Analysing India’s 2022-23 Union Budget, Neeraj Hatekar contends that MNREGA, the rural job guarantee programme that has not received additional funding vis-à-vis 2021-22 budget estimates, should be le...

  • Perspectives

Improving public service delivery by fixing payment systems

Fixing how funds flow through the government systems grabs far fewer headlines than malnutrition, problems in the education sector, or crumbling infrastructure. In this post, Charity Troyer Moore cont...

  • Perspectives

Fatal oblivion: India's National Family Benefit Scheme

The National Family Benefit Scheme (NFBS) – which provides financial assistance to families in the event of the death of a breadwinner – has been plagued by low budget allocations, restricted coverage...

  • Perspectives

Covid-19 and growing food insecurity: Insights from rural Bihar

Emerging research shows that Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on the already undernourished and marginalised populations, by affecting their access to food and nutrition, and consumption patterns...

  • Notes from the Field

Inducing water conservation in affluent urban households

Reducing the demand for water – particularly in affluent, urban households – can lower the burden of increasing supply to ensure universal access, and sustaining it at an affordable price. Based on a ...

  • Articles

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