The role of regulatory innovation in reversing India’s environmental degradation
In the Yale Environmental Performance Index, India ranked last out of 180 countries. Anant Sudarshan examines the broader economic and developmental costs of environmental degradation. Based on the li...
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Anant Sudarshan
17 June, 2022
- Perspectives
Economic dynamics of natural disasters: Evidence from the Kerala floods
To understand the economic impact of natural disasters, this article uses the 2018 floods in Kerala – a time when it received higher rainfall than the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu...
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Robert C M Beyer
Gogol Mitra Thakur
Abhinav Narayanan
13 February, 2023
- Articles
Reducing information barriers to solar adoption: Experimental evidence from India
A large number of people lack access to reliable and high-quality electricity supply. Off-grid solar technologies can fill this gap, but adoption remains low. This article looks at the role of informa...
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Meera Mahadevan
Robyn Meeks
Takashi Yamano
13 July, 2022
- Articles
The ‘Right to Energy’ and carbon tax: A game changer in India
India's carbon emissions in 2014 were more than three times its level in 1990. While the emissions have increased sharply, their distribution across income groups is extremely skewed. The poor in Indi...
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Rohit Azad
Shouvik Chakraborty
22 April, 2019
- Perspectives
Compensatory afforestation funds: A means or an end?
India has one of the most ambitious targets for forest cover as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement which will require considerable land and financial resources. In ...
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Shubham Sharma
10 April, 2019
- Perspectives
Gone with the wind: Crop-burning and the human costs of pollution
Globally, an estimated 4 million people die prematurely because of air pollution every year. This article exploits seasonal changes in air quality arising due to agricultural fires – used by farmers...
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Hemant Kumar Pullabhotla
20 March, 2019
- 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 northwes...
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Faraz Usmani
23 January, 2019
- Articles
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus’ ideas for India
William Nordhaus has won a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contribution to climate economics. In this post, Dean Spears discusses Nordhaus’ work and its implications for India. He...
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Dean Spears
15 October, 2018
- Perspectives
Understanding India’s energy and emissions future
India is an important player in global climate change mitigation, and it is crucial to understand its energy and emissions future. Projections for India’s 2030 CO2 emissions from energy range from 9...
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Ankit Bhardwaj
Navroz K. Dubash
Radhika Khosla
04 September, 2018
- Articles
Financing scale-up of rooftop solar power via municipal bonds
While India’s solar power generation capacity has increased dramatically in recent years, the rate of deployment of rooftop solar is still insufficient to achieve the national targets. In this post,...
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Amrita Goldar
Sandeep Paul
06 June, 2018
- Perspectives
Rural Electrification with Off-Grid Community Microgrids: An Impact Evaluation in Uttar Pradesh, India
This project assesses the socioeconomic effects of solar microgrids. The lack of access to electricity is a major obstacle to the socioeconomic development of more than a billion people.
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Michaёl Aklin
Patrick Bayer
S.P. Harish
Johannes Urpelainen
31 March, 2018
- IGC Research on India
Pollution Externalities and Health: A Study of Indian Rivers
In many developing countries, environmental quality remains low and policies to improve it have been inconsistently effective. This project conducts a case study of environmental policy, focussing on ...
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Quy-Toan Do
Shareen Joshi
Samuel Stolper
31 March, 2018
- IGC Research on India
Impact of groundwater accessibility on performance of firms
While labour laws and capital have been identified as key constraints to industrial growth, there is scant evidence on whether accessibility of vital natural resources, such as groundwater, also influ...
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Sheetal Sekhri
31 March, 2018
- IGC Research on India
Temperature and human capital in India
A large proportion of the population in India has agrarian livelihoods that remain climate-exposed. The number of hot days per year in the country are expected to double by the end of this century. T...
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Teevrat Garg
Maulik Jagnani
Vis Taraz
26 March, 2018
- Articles
Clearing the air: The effects of transparency on plant pollution emissions
Of the 20 cities in the world with the worst fine particulate air pollution, 13 are in India. If good information on who pollutes is available, then traditional environmental regulation can bring down...
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Michael Greenstone
Rohini Pande
Nicholas Ryan
Anant Sudarshan
31 December, 2017
- IGC Research on India
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Environment Posts
Happy Seeder: A solution to agricultural fires in north India
It is believed that much of the pollution in Delhi in November every year originates in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana where farmers burn their fields to dispose of crop residue. This ...
Ridhima Gupta
E. Somanathan
12 November, 2016
- Articles
Has environmental regulation been successful in India?
India has an impressive number of environmental regulations – but have they been a success? This column presents evidence that while initiatives such as catalytic converters for cars have reduced ai...
Michael Greenstone
Rema Hanna
16 May, 2012
- Articles
Learnings from emissions trade in India
India, and many developing nations in other parts of the world take solace in the U-shaped Kuznets curve: a belief in this inverse relationship between income and environmental quality results in not ...
Michael Greenstone
Anant Sudarshan
20 September, 2022
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