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Taxing Tobacco

The steep increase in excise taxes on cigarettes in this year’s Union Budget is a welcome move. However, this column argues that unless more commonly consumed bidis are also taxed heavily, the public ...

  • Articles

Financial inclusion for agricultural growth: An alternative approach

Traditional, group-based microcredit has had limited success at enabling farmers to expand the cultivation of risky but profitable cash crops. Evidence suggests that this is mainly because of its mech...

  • Articles

Assessing the quality and usefulness of MNREGA assets in Maharashtra

Questions have been raised regarding the quality and usefulness of assets created under MNREGA. To examine the validity of the scepticism, this column reports results from a study of MNREGA assets in...

  • Articles

Building state capacity for better programme implementation: Lessons from the Andhra Pradesh Smartcard Programme

Biometric payment systems are posited to reduce leakages in public welfare programmes but there is limited evidence on their effectiveness. This column presents evidence on the impact of the Andhra P...

  • Articles

What's the plan for MNREGA?

The new government’s plans to scale back MNREGA have elicited a mixed response. In this article, Abhijit Banerjee contends that both supporters and critics, and indeed the entire nation, deserve to be...

  • Articles

Can services be a growth escalator in low-income countries?

Just like the East Asian Tigers, the Lions of Africa are now growing much faster than the developed economies. However, this column shows that the growth escalators in Africa are different than in Ea...

  • Articles

Impact of Elite Capture on the Provision of Public Services

This project studies the effectiveness of major Government programmes in JEEViKA (Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project) villages versus others to see whether the presence of self-help groups leads to impro...

  • IGC Research on India

From tapering to tightening: The impact of the Fed's exit on India

India was among the hardest hit by the Fed’s ‘taper talks’. This column argues that this impact was large for two reasons. First, India received huge capital flows before. This had made it a convenie...

  • Articles

The Bihar story: Resurrection of the state

In the not so distant past, the Indian state of Bihar was a byword for corruption, lawlessness, poverty, and absence of governance. Over the last decade or so, the state has demonstrated a remarkable ...

  • Perspectives

Do awareness programmes on TV help change prejudices?

Awareness-based TV programmes, such as Satya Mev Jayate hosted by Bollywood film personality Aamir Khan, aim to change deep-seated prejudices of the society. To what extent do such programmes influenc...

  • Articles

How gender-inclusive is MNREGA in practice?

MNREGA mandates that a third of all workers under the programme should be women. But how gender inclusive has the implementation of the Act been? This column uses nationally representative data to an...

  • Perspectives

The Planning Commission and federal transfers

A key function of the Planning Commission was to allocate financial assistance from the centre to the states in support of the five-year plan. In view of the impending replacement of the Planning Com...

  • Perspectives