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Governance

Private returns to bureaucratic appointments: Evidence from financial disclosures in India

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Do value-added taxes benefit firms? Evidence from the adoption of state-specific value-added taxes

Value-added tax (VAT) systems have grown popular in the last 30 years, especially among developing countries looking for ways to raise tax revenue efficiently. Using 2000-2012 data on product, state-s...

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Does going cashless make you tax-rich? Evidence from India’s demonetisation

During 2014-2017, the share of adults using electronic payments in the developing world increased by over a third, and policymakers have expressed optimism regarding the role of this trend in promotin...

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Fixing incentives for power plants to reduce outages

Consumers in India face frequent power outages despite relatively high-quality infrastructure and ample supply of power plants. This article identifies a novel explanation for India’s blackouts: whe...

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Aadhaar Bill and government benefits: Better targeting and reduced corruption?

Supporters of Aadhaar express the hope that will reduce inclusion errors and corruption by eliminating ghost beneficiaries, say in schemes like MNREGA. Are there substantial benefits to be reaped on t...

  • Perspectives

Debate: The Aadhaar Bill

In a debate on the Aadhaar Bill, commentators from academia and civil society will weigh in on issues around potential benefits and privacy concerns.

  • Symposium

Aadhaar Bill: Incremental information-gathering powers for government?

The government already has the means to collect a lot of information on citizens (example, phone conversations and logs, credit card transactions, income tax records, bank account details, etc.). Conv...

  • Perspectives

Quality of governance and welfare outcomes

As the MDGs gave way to the SDGs, considerable attention has been focussed on movements in key welfare indicators for women and children in the past decade. In this context, this column compares India...

  • Perspectives

Rethinking clientelism: Politics of service delivery in rural India

Clientelism is often blamed for public service delivery failures in developing countries. While the top-down drivers of political support in exchange for service delivery for specific constituents is ...

  • Perspectives

Local political elite capture and BPL card allocation

There is significant anecdotal evidence for the fact that local political connections at the grassroots level is an important channel through which leakages take place in welfare schemes in India such...

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Asking the right question to get the right policy

There is consensus in the development community on the importance of bridging the gap between researchers and practitioners; however, misaligned incentives underlie this gap. In this article, Pande, M...

  • Perspectives

Is Bihar the new poster boy for PDS reforms?

Food security is a critical issue and Bihar has made remarkable progress over the years. The aim of this project was to document the supply side reforms in Bihar’s PDS and explain why or why not the...

  • IGC Research on India

How are India's new states faring?

In the year 2000, three new states – Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand – were carved out of the large states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh respectively. This column analyses the...

  • Perspectives

Regulating land markets: The colonial inheritance

State intervention in markets is usually thought of as a post-independence phenomenon. However, this column demonstrates that extensive State intervention in land and credit transactions can be traced...

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A conversation on development - II

Parikshit Ghosh (Member of the I4I Editorial Board & Associate Professor of Economics, Delhi School of Economics) speaks with Kaushik Basu (Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, World Bank and fo...

  • Perspectives

How a corruption scam brought MNREGA to a standstill in Nanded

Nanded district in Maharashtra demonstrated exemplary performance in MNREGA until 2012-13, when the exposure of a corruption scam brought the programme to a virtual standstill. In this note, researche...

  • Notes from the Field

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Gaurav Goel

Samagra

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Subrata Singh

Foundation for Ecological Security

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Pooja Chandran

Foundation for Ecological Security

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Pushkar Maitra

Monash University

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Vegard Iversen

University of Greenwich

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Francesca R. Jensenius

University of Oslo and the Norwegian Institute of

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Ananish Chaudhuri

University of Auckland

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Oliver Heath

Royal Holloway, University of London

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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, ...

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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...

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