18 February, 2022Budget and politics in pandemic times
Applying a political economy lens to the recently announced Budget 2022-23, Yamini Aiyar contends that the emphasis on capital expenditure over welfare in the two Budgets announced during the pandemic...
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Yamini Aiyar 
16 February, 2022
- Perspectives
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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Fiona Burlig Akshaya Jha Louis Preonas
- 08 April, 2022
- Articles
Improving public service delivery by fixing payment systems
Fixing how funds flow through the government systems grabs far fewer headlines than malnutrition, problems in the education sector, or crumbling infrastructure. In this post, Charity Troyer Moore cont...
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Charity Troyer Moore
- 28 January, 2022
- Perspectives
Political alignment and economic outcomes: Evidence from legislative assembly elections in India
Theory suggests better economic outcomes prevail when providers at different levels of government are politically aligned. While politicians are jointly responsible for several policies, other policie...
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Sourav Sarkar
- 02 August, 2019
- Articles
Ujjwala 2.0: What should be done next?
Stopping the use of wood and other solid fuels for cooking and other household uses is crucial to mitigating air pollution and its staggeringly high health impacts in India. In 2016, the government an...
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Ambuj Sagar Alok Tripathi
- 22 July, 2019
- Articles
Using mobiles to improve governance
Measuring how well major public programmes are implemented remains a core governance challenge. With the increasing mobile-phone penetration in the country, Muralidharan, Niehaus, Sukhtankar, and Weav...
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Karthik Muralidharan Paul Niehaus Sandip Sukhtankar Jeffrey Weaver
- 26 June, 2019
- Perspectives
India’s emerging crisis of representation
Article 81 of the Indian Constitution requires that each state receive Lok Sabha seats in proportion to its population and allocate those seats to constituencies of roughly equal size. However, the ch...
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Jamie Hintson Milan Vaishnav
- 29 May, 2019
- Articles
Power to the people: The impact of political report cards in India
How do Indian voters react to information on the qualifications and performance of politicians?
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Abhijit Banerjee
- 27 May, 2019
- Podcasts
Criminal politicians and informed voting in India
In India, 9% of legislators face criminal charges. Could voter information and coordination improve the country’s political representation?
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Yusuf Neggers
- 23 May, 2019
- Podcasts
Curbing leakage in public programmes: Evidence from Direct Benefit Transfer policy for LPG subsidies
Many developing countries subsidise access to essential commodities with in-kind transfer programmes, where beneficiaries receive goods at subsidised prices while non-beneficiaries have to pay the mar...
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Prabhat Barnwal
- 06 May, 2019
- Articles
Do roads bring votes in rural India?
A large-scale rural roads programme in India has provided access to over two-third of villages that lacked a paved road in 2001. Do citizens reward incumbent governments electorally for these improvem...
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Tanushree Goyal
- 26 April, 2019
- Articles
Oral democracy
Critical scrutiny of the challenges of electoral democracy including elite capture, corruption, and patronage has led to a revival of the idea of direct democracy – giving power directly to groups o...
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Vijayendra Rao Paromita Sanyal
- 24 April, 2019
- Articles
Are transparency and accountability enough? Open corruption and why it exists
While India’s federal anti-corruption ombudsmen have just taken up their work, awareness of the complexity of corruption is growing. This article studies whether highly accountable Indian village co...
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Dahyeon Jeong Ajay Shenoy Laura Zimmermann
- 18 April, 2019
- Articles
Should civil servants be allowed to serve in their home areas?
Bureaucrats form an essential part of State capacity. Should they be allowed to serve in their home areas? This article finds that Indian Administrative Service officers assigned to their home states ...
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Marianne Bertrand Robin Burgess Guo Xu
- 08 April, 2019
- Articles
Strengthen MNREGS to support the rural economy
India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) has generated a lot of controversy about its effectiveness as a safety net designed to benefit landless rural households. M...
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Karthik Muralidharan Paul Niehaus Sandip Sukhtankar
- 22 March, 2019
- 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