22 July, 2019Escaping the subsidy-quality trap in India’s retail electricity market
Cross-subsidies in retail electricity tariffs leave distribution utilities with neither the incentive nor the capital to improve reliability, particularly for their most subsidised consumers. Using bi...
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Shefali Khanna Kevin Rowe 
19 May, 2021
- Articles
When criminality begets crime: The role of elected politicians
The criminalisation of politics has become a massive threat to society. While the impact of criminally accused leaders on economic outcomes has been studied in the literature, little is known about th...
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Nishith Prakash Soham Sahoo Deepak Saraswat Reetika Sindhi
- 19 March, 2021
- Perspectives
DUET: Decentralise employment generation to urban local bodies
Dilip Mookherjee supports Drèze’s suggestion to decentralise employment generation to urban local bodies, and contends that the moribund nature of urban local government is a key reason for the neg...
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Dilip Mookherjee
- 14 September, 2020
- Perspectives
Breaking the silence on growing intolerance
Recent violent incidents in the country indicate a growing intolerance towards those whom we disagree with, as well as an unwillingness of politicians to defend the rights of people to speak and live...
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Abhijit Banerjee
- 26 October, 2015
- Perspectives
Economic development and Maoist insurgency
The Indian government’s two-pronged strategy to counter Maoist insurgency involves economic development and military repression. Analysing data for 2006-2011, this column finds that increasing wage...
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Anand Shrivastava
- 07 October, 2015
- Articles
Outlays to Outcomes: Understanding pathways to improving learning outcome
This project responds to a specific Government of Bihar request to assess the effectiveness of its "Mission Gunvatta" programme, which aimed at improving the learning outcomes of children attending el...
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Yamini Aiyar Ambrish Dongre
- 17 September, 2015
- IGC Research on India
What do we know about corruption in India?
Despite ample media coverage of corruption, there remains a gap between headline-making scandals, policy options under discussion, and the actual evidence base drawn from empirical research on corrup...
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Sandip Sukhtankar Milan Vaishnav
- 16 September, 2015
- Articles
The need for police reform
The police in India are still mainly governed by the Police Act of 1861. In this article, Abhijit Banerjee, Professor of Economics at MIT, emphasises the need for police reform in order to check misu...
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Abhijit Banerjee
- 09 September, 2015
- Perspectives
Is the MNREGA fund crunch making the programme clientelistic?
Fund allocation for MNREGA has seen a steady decline in real terms over the last few years. Analysing official MNREGA data along with survey data from Rajasthan, this column shows that in the face of...
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Upasak Das Diego Maiorano
- 02 September, 2015
- Articles
The political economy of data
Recent experiences, especially from Scandinavian countries, show that opening administrative data sources can substantially improve public policymaking. In this article, Pande and Blum contend that w...
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Florian Blum Rohini Pande
- 21 August, 2015
- Perspectives
The significance of local power structures in Bihar's coupon-based PDS
In 2007, Bihar introduced the coupon system in PDS to curb leakages at fair price shops. This column argues that even though the administrative logic of the coupon system is fundamentally sound, such...
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Chetan Choithani Bill Pritchard
- 17 August, 2015
- Articles
Charting a course for the Indian economy
Karthik Muralidharan (Associate Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego) speaks with Arvind Subramanian (Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India) on a broad set of issues rang...
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Karthik Muralidharan Arvind Subramanian
- 05 August, 2015
- Videos
He is a criminal but he is our criminal: Criminally accused politicians in India
The recent increase in the number of criminally-accused politicians elected to state assemblies has caused much furore in India. Despite the potentially important consequences and the widely divergent...
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Nishith Prakash Marc Rockmore Yogesh Uppal
- 01 August, 2015
- IGC Research on India
Elucidating avenues for corruption: Micronutrient fortification strategies in India’s Midday Meals Programme
Globally, iron deficiency is a leading cause of anaemia, a condition that is particularly harmful during early childhood, causing fatigue and slower physical and cognitive development with potentially...
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James Berry Saurabh Mehta Priya Mukherjee Gauri Kartini Shastry
- 30 July, 2015
- IGC Research on India
Why numbers matter
The delayed and partial release of data from the ‘Rapid Survey on Children’ by the Indian government has given rise to questions and speculation. In this article, former bureaucrat V. Ramani disc...
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V. Ramani
- 23 July, 2015
- Perspectives
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost 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...
- Mudit Kapoor
- 23 December, 2016
- 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, ...
- Siwan Anderson
- 16 August, 2012
- Articles
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 2...
- Ashutosh Thakur
- 18 March, 2019
- Articles