05 May, 2025Accountability and responsibility
Accountability of public institutions and employees is deemed important for them to function for the common good. In this post, Drèze and Sen argue that accountability is only one aspect of a much br...
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Jean Drèze Amartya Sen 
13 March, 2025
- Perspectives
How immigration policy uncertainty affects labour markets
President Trump’s re-election has reignited debate over H-1B visa policies, a temporary high-skill work visa programme wherein 70% of visas are held by Indians. Analysing jobs data from India from t...
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Ritam Chaurey Kanika Mahajan Shekhar Tomar
- 08 January, 2025
- Articles
Fiscal 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
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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Siwan Anderson
- 16 August, 2012
- Articles
A plague on all houses
Which is better, India´s liberal capitalism modelled on the US or China´s authoritarian state-controlled capitalism? This column argues that dysfunctional governments in both systems are leading to ...
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Pranab Bardhan
- 13 August, 2012
- Articles
The Transfer Raj
When Chief Ministers come to power in India, they extensively reshuffle civil servants postings. This column asks why state politicians transfer bureaucrats, whether they favour loyalty over competenc...
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Lakshmi Iyer Anandi Mani
- 01 August, 2012
- Articles
How do Indian voters respond to candidates with criminal charges: Evidence from Lok Sabha elections
An alarming number of India’s politicians have criminal records or some charges against them. This column asks how they manage to get away with it. It looks at evidence from parliamentary elections ...
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Bhaskar Dutta Poonam Gupta
- 30 July, 2012
- Articles
Corruption and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
Corruption continues to strangle India’s public finances. This column presents evidence of embezzlement in India’s flagship rural employment programme and suggests new ways policymakers can test w...
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Sandip Sukhtankar
- 16 July, 2012
- Articles
Understanding Mandis: Market Towns and the Dynamics of India's Rural and Urban Transformations
The idea behind this project is to undertake process-oriented investigations that will involve the study of interactions, especially between agricultural markets, settlements, technology, infrastructu...
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Devesh Kapur Mekhala Krishnamurthy
- 01 April, 2012
- IGC Research on India
Enhancing Local Public Service Delivery: Experimental Evidence on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Bihar
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA) is among the largest social protection programmes in the world.
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Abhijit Banerjee Esther Duflo Rohini Pande
- 31 March, 2012
- IGC Research on India
Third-party environmental auditing
High levels of industrial pollution are a harmful by-product of growth. The Indian state of Gujarat is an industrial powerhouse with about 5% of the Indian population, but 9% of India’s registered m...
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Esther Duflo Michael Greenstone Rohini Pande Nicholas Ryan
- 01 March, 2012
- IGC Research on India
Land Acquisition for Business and Compensation of Displaced Farmers
This project addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialisation ought to be compensated. Prior to acquisition, the farmers are lea...
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Maitreesh Ghatak Sandip Mitra Dilip Mookherjee
- 01 March, 2012
- IGC Research on India
Federal versus Regional Control: Implications for Groundwater Resource in India
Federal versus regional control over provision of resources can have different implications for long-run sustainability of natural resources. This project examines the trade-off between short-term gro...
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Sheetal Sekhri
- 31 March, 2011
- IGC Research on India
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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