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Tag Search: “public service delivery”

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 200...

  • Articles

Rural electrification and structural transformation: A guar(anteed) bet?

Is large-scale electrification necessary for the structural transformation of rural economies? This article combines two natural experiments in India – an exogenous agricultural boom in the northwest ...

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Out of power? Political capture of the Indian electricity sector

Although power generation has been growing exponentially in India, the quality of electricity supply remains poor. This article argues that political corruption is among the root causes behind unrelia...

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Need for a choice-based approach in PDS

A large share of public spending on the Public Distribution System (PDS), India’s flagship food security programme, does not reach intended beneficiaries. Thus, the idea of Direct Benefits Transfer (D...

  • Perspectives

Are women politicians good for economic growth?

There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the last two decades, but there is no evidence of how this influences economic performance. This article investiga...

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Promoting women in grassroots governance: Strategies that work

There are more than a million women elected to the Panchayati Raj Institutions of local governance in India. Despite constitutional provisions, women face many barriers when they participate in local ...

  • Notes

Food subsidy – PDS, cash, or both?

Should food subsidies – currently availed in the form of subsidised cereals – be given out in the form of cash instead? In this post, Krishna and Agrawal contend that rather than asking this binary qu...

  • Perspectives

Anganwadi: A workforce of women with a near-impossible mandate

With a workforce of 1.4 million women, the Anganwadi system forms the backbone of India’s Integrated Child Development Services Scheme – the world’s largest community-based programme for child develop...

  • Notes

Providing information on school quality in a dysfunctional public education system

Insufficient school accountability and limited parental awareness of school quality can result in poor learning outcomes of students. This article reports the results of a randomised experiment in rur...

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An offline alternative for Aadhaar-based biometric authentication

While decision on the constitutionality of Aadhaar by the Supreme Court of India remains a matter of speculation, it has become abundantly clear that most of the use cases for Aadhaar-based biometric ...

  • Perspectives

Enhancing nutrition among the poor: UBI vs. welfare programmes

Some proponents of universal basic income (UBI) for India believe that the unconditional cash transfer should replace existing welfare programmes. Based on analysis of National Sample Survey data, thi...

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Aadhaar that doesn’t exclude

Aadhaar is in the news today partly because of security concerns and partly because of reports that the poor are unable to receive PDS rations because of failures in Aadhaar authentication. In this ar...

  • Perspectives