Election of criminal politicians and public service delivery

Why are politicians with criminal records elected to office, despite voters having the option to weed them out? Based on the hypothesis that criminal politicians strategically deliver targeted benefit...

  • Articles

Boosting Lekhpal performance via data-driven feedback and recognition

The Lekhpals Actionable KPI System for Holistic Assessment and Management (LAKSHYAM) is an initiative to measure and enhance the work performance of Lekhpals, who are frontline functionaries of the Re...

  • Notes from the Field

Building State capacity for accelerating development through effective governance

In a new edition of I4I conversations, Maitreesh Ghatak (London School of Economics) is joined by Karthik Muralidharan (University of California, San Diego) to discuss his new book, Accelerating India...

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Bank and its critics

There has been a lot of commentary in recent weeks on the Reserve Bank of India, around its capital base, performance, and autonomy. In this post, Amartya Lahiri contends that RBI has a more coherent ...

  • Perspectives

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 from the Field

Does choice of procurement contract matter for cost and quality of highways?

In the past, infrastructure projects in India have suffered from long delays, massive cost overruns, and poor quality of assets. A widely held belief is that public private partnerships (PPPs) can sol...

  • Articles

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 binar...

  • 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 d...

  • Notes from the Field

How leader identity impacts group coordination

In principle, leaders can facilitate group coordination towards a common goal but in diverse societies, their effectiveness may depend upon their social identity, and how citizens react to leader iden...

  • Articles

Heart of darkness: Misplaced priorities of Jharkhand’s District Mineral Foundation

In 2015, the central government launched District Mineral Foundations in the districts affected by mining, which are mandated to collect royalty from all mining activities and use the funds for the we...

  • Notes from the Field

The Impact of Community-Driven Accountability on Land Rights Governance: Evidence from a Homestead Land Titling Initiative

How and under what circumstances can civic mobilization improve local governance and service delivery? This project seeks to contribute to debates on this question through a multi-method analysis of a...

  • IGC Research on India

Judicial Institutions and Economic Development: Examining Micro-evidence from India

This project examines the relationship between a country’s legal environment and its economic outcomes. This project will be constructing relevant measures of friction from trial level data at subor...

  • IGC Research on India

Do Indian voters mind their representatives getting rich in office?

Asset declarations, requiring politicians to disclose their financial information, are becoming increasingly common across the world. In India, financial declarations are part of public affidavits fil...

  • Articles

How governance and public expenditure impact human development

The state of Madhya Pradesh displays wide variance in human development outcomes across its districts. This article examines the link between public expenditure, quality of governance, and human devel...

  • Articles

Do dishonest people gravitate towards the public sector in India?

The corruption level in the public sector may not only depend on punishments and systems put in place to deter corruption, but also on who chooses to enter the sector. This article finds that people w...

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Recent Contributors

Yamini

Yamini Aiyar

Brown University

Shrayana

Shrayana Bhattacharya

Author and Economist

Abhinav

Abhinav Khemka

University of Milan Statale

Fahad

Fahad Hasin

IDinsight

Sakshi

Sakshi Ugale

Government of Maharastra

Maitreesh

Maitreesh Ghatak

London School of Economics

Karthik

Karthik Muralidharan

University of California, San Diego

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Jean Drèze

Ranchi University; Delhi School of Economics

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Most Popular Governance Posts

Unique Health Identification and Aadhaar: A case for mandatory linkage

As part of the Digital India initiative, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) issues a Unique Health Identification (UHID) number to each patient, which documents their entire journey in th...

  • Perspectives

Caste dominance in rural India: Cause and effect

Rural India remains a caste-based society. This column explores why caste continues to play such an important role and what the effects are. It argues that trade and agricultural productivity suffer, ...

  • Articles

The digital dream: Upskilling India for the future

While the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace at which technology is becoming commonplace in our lives, it has also exposed a stark digital divide, leaving a large proportion of India’s popul...

  • Perspectives