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Tag Search: “public service delivery”

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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

Ashok Kotwal speaks with Jean Drèze

I4I Editor-in-Chief Ashok Kotwal speaks with Jean Drèze, visiting Professor at Ranchi University and an ‘economist-activist’ who has been working in India at the grassroots level for a long time. The...

  • Notes

Introduction to e-Symposium: Firms and labour productivity

Eighty per cent of India’s labour force works ‘informally’. Providing employment with decent wages and benefits to this segment requires structural transformation of the economy to more high-producti...

  • Symposia

Social Networks, Property Rights and Public Services in the Slums of Patna and Jaipur

This project provides important original insight into the factors that condition the capacity of the urban poor to achieve formal recognition of slums, private property rights, and better public servi...

  • IGC Research on India