08 January, 2025Fiscal transfers and natural calamities: Does political alignment matter?
Fiscal transfers from the central government serve as an important mechanism for state governments to mitigate adverse impacts of extreme climate events. This article demonstrates that higher allocati...
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K. S. Kavi Kumar Anubhab Pattanayak 
14 November, 2024
- Articles
Why political competition matters when inequality is high
In a high-inequality setting, local politicians with secure positions may favour the rich by diverting resources towards them, at the cost of the poor. To test this hypothesis, this article analyses d...
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Anders Kjelsrud Kalle Moene Lore Vandewalle
- 13 September, 2024
- Articles
Expected or unexpected? Strategic communication around audits to maximise deterrence
Even with evidence on how audits can be designed to be more effective in deterring corruption by bureaucrats, in practice, budget constraints restrict governments from being able to conduct audits wit...
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Wendy Wong
- 11 September, 2024
- Articles
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...
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Jean Drèze Reetika Khera Raju Rajagopal Bharat Ramaswami
- 02 May, 2016
- 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...
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Salma Ahmed Ranjan Ray
- 27 April, 2016
- 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 ...
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Aditya Dasgupta
- 19 April, 2016
- 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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Sitakanta Panda
- 08 April, 2016
- Articles
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...
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Eric Dodge Charity Troyer Moore Rohini Pande
- 04 April, 2016
- 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...
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Aaditya Dar Chinmaya Kumar Pankaj Verma
- 01 April, 2016
- 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...
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Amrita Dhillon Pramila Krishnan Manasa Patnam Carlo Perroni
- 02 March, 2016
- 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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Anand Swamy
- 10 February, 2016
- Articles
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...
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Kaushik Basu Parikshit Ghosh
- 03 February, 2016
- 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...
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Sangita Jadhav Ashwini Kulkarni Aysha Shamsuddin
- 28 January, 2016
- Notes from the Field
Unleashing the full potential of India's 'Open Government Data' initiative
In October 2012, India embarked upon its ‘Open Government Data’ journey, by opening up access to government-owned shareable data in machine-readable formats for the use of general public. In this...
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Natasha Agarwal
- 26 January, 2016
- Perspectives
Access to energy in rural India: A survey of six states
While access to energy is crucial for socioeconomic development, statistically representative surveys on the issue are missing in India. Based on a survey on energy access in six energy-poor states i...
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Chao-yo Cheng Abhishek Jain Johannes Urpelainen
- 18 January, 2016
- Articles
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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
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...
- Venugopal Mothkoor Fatima Mumtaz
- 23 March, 2021
- Perspectives