The United Nations defines the “sustainable energy transition” as a structural shift away from fossil fuels toward a system centered on renewable energy. Crucially, the UN emphasises that a truly “just transition” must prioritise equity and inclusion—ensuring that clean energy systems are accessible to all segments of society, leaving no one behind.
When discussing the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, international or national policies discussions often focus on massive infrastructure investment or regulations that mandate the change. However, an equal catalyst for the green transition may be simpler than we often assume: the power of choices.
Authors Richar Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book, Nudge, introduced the concept of ‘Choice Architecture” and ‘Nudge Theory’, argued that people do not make choices randomly rather, the way options are presented within our environment heavily influences the decisions we make. In urban design, a well-designed city ‘nudges’, people towards healthier or more sustainable behaviors, such as walking, cycling, or recycling, by making those choices the default, easiest, most intuitive and most accessible options without restricting individual’s freedom to choose otherwise (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008).
This principle is particularly relevant to urban transport. Populations are more likely to move away from traditional carbon-intensive modes of transportation when cities provide multiple sustainable alternatives that fit into their daily routines, accessibility, travel-time, and cost. Indeed, transitioning from Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) to Electric Vehicle (EV), or to public transport, may not be as simple as policymakers assume, especially if one has to make significant sacrifices. For instance, a commuter may be reluctant to adopt a greener transport option if doing so requires walking a mile from home or work simply to access it.
After spending nearly two months in Delhi during my internship with the Urban Team at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), I have witnessed this behavioral design principle in practice. Delhi does not just tell commuters to “be sustainable”, it provides a wide range of alternatives. Depending on destination and preferences, I can reduce the emissions associated with my daily commute by taking Delhi Metro, boarding an electric bus, using an electric auto-rickshaw, or completing the last mile on an app-based at times on electric two wheelers. Sustainability is not presented as an obligation; it is increasingly becoming a convenient choice.
While writing this blog from the premises of the CPR, imagine what my transport choices would look like if I were in Niamey, the capital of Niger. As someone who is aware of the growing risk of climate change, particularly for developing countries, I would not have access to the same range of low-emission transport options available in Delhi. This is not because Niger lacks climate ambitions. On the contrary, Niger’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP, 2022) identifies transport as a key sector impacted by climate change and establishes several strategic objectives for mitigation and adaptation. Similarly, the National Transport Strategy (NTS), aligned with the country’s long-term development vision (SDDCI-Niger 2035), seeks to provide transport services that are sustainable and environmentally responsible. Furthermore, Niger’s Renewable Energy Action Plan (PANER) identifies neem oil as a potential energy source while the Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) investment prospectus highlights the production and use of liquid and gaseous biofuels for the transport sector.
Although ″Société des transports urbains du Niger‶ (SOTRUNI) remains the main public urban transport operator, the Nigerien government recently took a significant step forward. On May 18 2026, during a Council of Ministers meeting, it adopted two draft decrees establishing the Nigerien Urban Transport Company (SONITU). Beyond the formal public transport system, urban mobility in Niamey relies heavily on the informal transport sector. This includes shared taxi, private minibuses, three-wheelers (primarily used for transporting goods and furniture), and, in some neighborhoods, motorcycle taxi. However, Niamey’s urban transport system remains constrained by limited infrastructure and lack of diverse mobility options. As a result, citizens continue to rely on the conventional combustion-engine vehicles out of necessity rather than preference.
Beyond the availability of diverse transport choices, financial and regulatory incentives can also accelerate the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy. A recent article by Shivam published by Adda24/7 Current Affairs, titled Delhi EV Policy 2.0 Explained: New Rules, Subsidies, Tax Benefits and Petrol Vehicle Deadlines from July 1, 2026, provides an overview of the Delhi Government’s approval of the Delhi EV Policy 2.0, which is scheduled to run from July 1 2026, to March 31 2030. The policy aims to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles through subsidies, tax exemptions, scrappage incentives, and the gradual phase-out of petrol and compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles. Backed by an estimated budget of ₹15,000 crore, it seeks to improve Delhi’s air quality, reduce vehicular emissions, and expand EV infrastructure. Among its most attractive measures is a 100% exemption from road tax and registration fees for electric vehicles with an ex-showroom price of up to ₹30 lakh, generating potential savings of ₹1.5 lakh to ₹2 lakh for buyers. Such measures demonstrate how financial incentives can complement consumer choice by making the transition to clean mobility both economically and practically appealing.
Despite these efforts and the various solutions offered to facilitate urban mobility, Delhi continues to face severe air pollution during certain periods of the year. Although electric buses, metro systems, and other low-emission transport options have expanded considerably, significant persistent air quality challenges remain.
According to data from the Government of India’s Decision Support System (DSS), stubble burning can account for 35–45% of Delhi’s air pollution during peak farm-fire periods. Delhi’s air pollution crisis is influenced by both local sources and external factors, highlighting the complexity of air quality management in the National Capital Region (NCR). DSS data reported by Hindustan Timesshowed that 67.89% of Delhi’s total PM2.5 pollution originated from external sources, while the remaining 32.11% was attributed to sources within the capital. Among local sources, vehicular emissions accounted for the largest share, contributing 16.43% (Gandhiok, 2025).
Addressing transport-related challenges associated with increasing use of private vehicles will be crucial for Delhi’s sustainable development. A continued shift toward private motorization risks exacerbating, deteriorating air quality, increasing energy demand, and raising carbon emissions. Strengthening public transport and promoting low-carbon mobility options will be essential for aligning Delhi’s urban development trajectory with the objectives of Viksit Bharat 2047 and India’s Net Zero 2070 commitment.
Ultimately, Delhi’s experience suggests that the success of a sustainable urban transport transition depends not only on infrastructure investments and environmental regulations, but also on the choices available to citizens. When sustainable options become convenient, affordable, and accessible, people are more likely to adopt them voluntarily. For cities such as Niamey, the challenge may therefore be less about convincing citizens to embrace greener mobility and more about creating the conditions that allow them to choose it in the first place.
Acknowledgment: The author would like to thank Dr. Pushpa Pathak for her valuable guidance and helpful feedback during the preparation of this blog.
(The author is an intern at CPR and MBA Candidate in Sustainable Development and Management at Nalanda University.)
“Data forces you to think, and how you think about elections in India.” With these words, Professor Pradeep K. Chhibber invited the audience to go beyond the surface-level explanation of what dictates Indian elections and confront a fundamental question: why are elections in India so unpredictable?
That question brought a packed audience to the Indian International Centre (IIC) on July 15, for a discussion on why nearly a quarter of India’s electorate shifts its vote from one election to the next, and what this reveals about the country’s democratic politics. The discussion challenged conventional assumptions about Indian elections, to deep dive into how village-level electoral volatility and the weak political mobilisation of poorer classes create shifting voting patterns.
Organised by the IIC in collaboration with the Centre for Policy Research, the discussion featured Professor Pradeep K. Chhibber (University of California), Barkha Dutt (Senior Journalist and Founder, MoJo Story), Roshan Kishore (Political Economy and Data Editor, Hindustan Times), and Rahul Verma (Fellow, CPR). Drawing on Chhibber’s forthcoming book, “The Reciprocity Trap: Weak Parties, Elite Networks, and the Marginalization of the Poor in India”, co-authored with Francesca Jensenius (Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo) and village-level election data, national surveys, and extensive fieldwork, the panel explored why Indian elections continue to defy prediction.
While caste, religion, and community remain central to electoral politics, frequent vote swings and shifting party loyalties suggest that identity alone cannot explain voting behaviour.
Data presented by Chhibber shows that India’s electoral volatility. defined “as the net change within the party system resulting from individual vote transfers”, remained remarkably high between 1952 and 2004 compared with many other large democracies. The evidence raises a compelling question: what drives these persistent shifts in voter behaviour?
Electoral Volatility and Political Stronghold Polling booth data from the 2009–2019 Lok Sabha elections suggests that electoral volatility originates in the “villages” because of two major reasons, which Chhibber attributes to: lack of local political strongholds, and patterns of identity-based political mobilisation. An analysis of the Election Commission of India’s polling booth data for the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections reveals an interesting trend. While many villages gave a clear majority of votes to a single party in each election, very few consistently backed the same party over time. Chhibber argued that this challenges the conventional wisdom that Indian political parties enjoy stable village-level “strongholds”. A party may win a village by a large margin in one election, but that does not mean voters will support it again in the next. The data shows that electoral loyalties at the village level are far more fluid than is often assumed, making genuine long-term party strongholds relatively rare. The same trend is visible even during the BJP’s sweeping victory in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Despite the party’s perceived national dominance, support at the village level remained more volatile indicating that local voting patterns continue to shift from one election to the next. “And that’s something you need to think about. So even for the case of the BJP in 2014-2019, the same pattern appears — definitely more strongholds, but not as many strongholds as we like to think there are,” Chhibber noted. As against the popular belief of “geographical strongholds”, Chhibber also challenged the idea that political parties enjoy geographically entrenched support bases. Comparing village-level voting patterns across states such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, he analysed that different political parties dominate neighbouring regions despite their geographic proximity. While the BJP and the Indian National Congress (INC) dominated most villages in Kutch, parties such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Indian Justice Party dominated villages in Uttar Pradesh during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Teasing one to think, he said, “So in other words, there’s very little evidence that parties control nationally that parties control these geographies.” Drawing on additional data analysis, such as the spatial distribution of BJP votes in Uttar Pradesh between 2014 to 2019, the speaker returned to his central argument on how Indian voting patterns are often based on weak political strongholds at the village level and the persistent disconnect between poor and political parties.
How EV Affects Vote at Village Levels Chhibber argued that voters in poorer areas are more likely to change their voting preferences from one election to the next.
Drawing on National Election Studies (NES) and CSDS survey data from 1996 to 2024, he found that poorer voters across all major social groups are less likely to be contacted by political parties during election campaigns. As a result, they are more likely to switch parties, vote for smaller parties or NOTA, and are less likely to turn out to vote.
His forthcoming book argues that these patterns are driven not by voters’ preferences, but by political parties’ failure to engage and mobilise poorer communities during elections, leaving them less politically connected and more open to changing their vote.
The question that follows is why is this the case? Why aren’t the poor mobilised? Well, the answers are multifactored. Local Influencers and Reciprocity Trap
Indian elections are infamous for their immensity. In order to self-finance large political campaigns, and with limited grassroots infrastructure and vast constituencies to cover, parties increasingly outsource campaign mobilisation to “local influential figures”, who tend to engage only their own caste- and community-based elite networks. As a result, large sections of poorer voters remain outside the reach of party campaigns, making electoral support more fluid and weakening the emergence of durable local strongholds. “What this means is a party system based on caste and community identity politics can coexist with vote volatility. When parties mobilise only a part of each caste and community, they’re only mobilising the elites. This is what we call the reciprocity trap,” Chhibber noted. To break it down, the ‘reciprocity trap’ is what follows when political parties need votes and funds for winning and political gains. Due to their organisational weakness, local candidates rely on local influencers to provide access to both. These local influencers extract resources from parties, gain wealth, status and impunity. These elite networks are class biased. A reciprocity trap locks parties and influentials into this arrangement. In some cases, this deepens ties between parties and influentials. And therefore the under mobilisation of the poor “is a structural equilibrium of Indian politics.” Reviewing Chhibber’s analysis, Roshan Kishore observed that funding elections requires wealthy intermediaries, reinforcing patronage networks and limiting the state’s ability to address deeper structural problems. Hence, despite ideological differences, major political parties broadly converge in their relationship with capital. Class, Caste, and Identity over Populism and Welfarism An important question, however, remained: what role do welfare schemes and populism play?
Drawing on three decades of covering elections, Barkha Dutt asked whether welfare schemes could mobilise poorer voters by bypassing local power networks. “Is a welfare scheme a form of mobilisation that bypasses the local influential network? This has been known to mobilise masses from weaker economic sections,” she observed.
This returned to the book’s central argument that while welfare schemes and populist measures may temporarily strengthen the relationship between political parties and poorer voters, they do not eliminate parties’ dependence on local elites. As a result, class continues to play a significant role in shaping electoral politics.
Kishore argued that class is often masked by talks of identity politics, even though economic interests continue to shape political behaviour in crucial ways. Recognising this changes how we understand Indian democracy. If stronger party organisations are essential to representing poorer citizens, then the relationship between class, political parties and democratic participation deserves nuanced attention.
He emphasised that democracy is not just about elections, but also about how effectively political parties organise and mobilise people. Parties that are better organised at the village levels are more likely to reach, engage and represent a wider section of society, particularly those who are often left out of the political process. Looking at India’s political history, Kishore noted that class-based politics was once a significant force, as seen in the early success of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Reflecting on its decline, Roshan argued that communist parties struggled because they failed to effectively address caste alongside class. Outside the states of West Bengal and Kerala, he said, their inability to navigate caste politics limited their electoral appeal and contributed to their decline.
The Case for Bengal and Kerala Stand aside However, the research also establishes that states, such as West Bengal and Kerala, which have greater political outreach to poorer voters, have lower electoral volatility. This suggests that stronger party structures can reduce dependence on local intermediaries and produce more consistency in voting patterns and durable strongholds. Kerala and Bengal continue to hold local-level Panchayat elections, an important avenue to engage poorer voters directly.
Kishore noted, “West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu have partisan tribal elections and party mobilisation is the lever. Our survey data shows that this is not because the poor are poor. But the poor, who are contacted and politically included, their attitudes and political behavior indeed changes.”
For Chhibber, the implication is clear: the political exclusion of the poor is not a structural consequence of poverty, but a consequence of how political parties are organised. Where parties invest in grassroots mobilisation, poorer voters are more likely to participate, remain politically engaged and exhibit more stable voting behaviour.
How ‘blood and water cannot flow together’ became a political and diplomatic doctrine
The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 survived three full-scale wars between India and Pakistan—the 1965 war, the 1971 war, and the 1999 Kargil conflict, as well as major diplomatic crises, including the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the 2008 Mumbai bombings. For over five decades, the Permanent Indus Commission met annually, exchanging hydrological data even when diplomatic communication between the countries was limited. Then, on 27 September 2016, cooperative mechanisms under the IWT were suspended for the first time. The rupture was driven less by hydrology or engineering constraints alone, and more by politics and rhetoric.
Nine days earlier, on 18 September 2016, militants attacked an Indian Army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir, resulting in 19 fatalities. The Indian government linked the attack to a Pakistan-based militant group. At a government review meeting in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that “blood and water cannot flow together,” linking water cooperation to the broader security environment. On the same day, India announced it would not convene the next annual meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission until Pakistan ended support for cross-border terrorism.
This statement, while metaphorical, altered the relationship between water management and security. It did not threaten abrogation, announce a legal position, or outline immediate action. Its significance lay in signalling that water would henceforth be tied to political and security considerations. Pakistan depends primarily on the three western rivers of the Indus Basin—the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab—which were allocated to it under the Treaty. India has limited infrastructure to block or divert these rivers. Statements by the Indian Prime Minister Modi and, later, the Indian Union Minister, Nitin Gadkari, referring to stopping water to Pakistan, largely concerned the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) that India already utilises domestically. Technically, there was no new water to withhold; politically, however, the statements generated concern in Pakistan. Yet the Treaty’s legal architecture provides important constraints on such possibilities, requiring disputes to proceed through established mechanisms involving the Permanent Indus Commission, Neutral Expert review, and arbitration procedures, with the World Bank playing a facilitating role.
Pakistan’s public and political response was immediate. Addressing the National Assembly, Sartaj Aziz, Adviser to the PM Nawaz Sharif on Foreign Affairs, stated that any attempt to revoke the Treaty could be regarded as an “act of war.” This position was subsequently reinforced through a unanimously adopted parliamentary resolution. Pakistani leaders portrayed India’s actions as a potential instrument of water coercion and stressed that any unilateral measures would be challenged legally.
The doctrine quickly became a tool in India’s domestic political arena. Two months after the 2016 meeting, in November 2016, PM Modi, campaigning in Punjab six weeks before state assembly elections, promised that “every drop of this water will be stopped and given to the farmers of Punjab.” The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance was in power in Punjab during that time. Though the alliance ultimately lost the election, competing parties adopted similar positions, making water rights a recurring theme in state-level electoral politics. In subsequent years, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) also maintained that no water from Punjab should be diverted to Haryana. Such statements show how water-related issues increasingly became part of domestic political contestation, extending beyond India-Pakistan relations to inter-state debates within India.
In February 2019, after the Pulwama bombing, Gadkari reiterated that “not a single drop of water will be allowed to go to Pakistan,” signalling resolve amid domestic electoral and public pressure. These statements followed a pattern: a security event occurs, elections approach, and water-related rhetoric intensifies.
Between 2022 and 2024, as disputes over the Kishanganga and Ratle dams were referred to international arbitration, Pakistani political rhetoric increasingly framed India’s dam construction as a threat to Pakistan’s water security and as a form of water weaponisation.
By 2025, after a militant attack in Pahalgam, India effectively placed the Treaty in abeyance, echoing the original 2016 phrasing: “terror and talks cannot happen; water and blood cannot flow together.” Pakistan responded that this constituted an “act of war,” constrained by the prior unanimous parliamentary resolution.
The significance of this development lay not only in its immediate impact on India-Pakistan relations, but also in the broader questions it raised about the future of the Treaty. As political rhetoric increasingly translated into policy decisions, concerns emerged regarding the consequences of such a shift, extending beyond the bilateral relationship to the future of the Treaty itself.
Commentators interpreted this shift in different ways. Former diplomat Syed Akbaruddin argued that the Treaty’s durability should be viewed in the context of India’s long record of upholding it despite wars, terrorist attacks, and prolonged political tensions. From this perspective, the growing linkage between water cooperation and security reflected accumulated frustrations that had become increasingly difficult to separate from the Treaty’s operation. Regardless of interpretation, repeated rhetorical signalling on both sides contributed to a political environment in which compromise became increasingly difficult.
Conclusion
The significance of “blood and water cannot flow together” lies not in the statement itself, but in what followed. Invoked after the Uri attack and recurring after Pulwama and Pahalgam, each a distinct act of cross-border terrorism, the phrase evolved from a crisis response into a recurring reference point in India-Pakistan relations, gathering weight with each repetition rather than fading after the crisis that produced it. Similar rhetoric later emerged in Pakistan, indicating how water increasingly came to occupy a more prominent place in political and diplomatic contestation, with each side’s language reinforcing the other’s over time. As this rhetoric becomes more embedded on both sides, it raises a structural question for the Treaty’s future: whether the technical, depoliticised cooperation that sustained it for over six decades can be restored once water has been so closely tied to security in the public discourse.
In the ancient times, trade was the primary economic activity which led to the establishment of urban settlements, where agricultural surplus was exchanged for manufactured or imported goods like iron, stone, wood, agricultural implements, textiles, spices, etc. Over time these small market-towns also became industrial centers where artisans and crafts persons produced a range of goods catering to the demands of the towns’ inhabitants, nearby villages as well as for exporting to other regions. Hence, trade and industries became the two main pillars of growth of market towns into larger complex urban centers with multiple functions. Merchants and industrialists have played an important role in the small towns’ development and administration for a long time.
Dhampur, located in the agriculturally rich Western Uttar Pradesh, is an apt example of small towns’ economy where trade and industry have played an equally important role in its earlier development. However, trade seems to be gaining more prominence in the recent decades. The Census of India data indicates that employment in trade in Dhampur increased from about 22 percent in 1961 to 32 per cent in 1991 while employment in both Household and Non-household industries declined from about 26 per cent to 20 per cent in the same years. These two sectors together continue to account for about half of the economic employment of the town. However, the nature of the trade has changed over time both in terms of the nature and quantum of commodities traded as well as the spatial distribution of the trading establishments.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the trading area of Dhampur lay along a narrow street in the congested center of the town, where wholesale and retail activities were tightly packed surrounded by densely populated old residential areas. Dhampur had already become one of the district’s main market centers. The Badi Mandi was the center of wholesale trade, with about fifty shops and agencies dealing with sugar export and food grain imports. The retail trade was conducted through around two hundred shops in the Kalan bazar, the town’s main market. Other shops and services were scattered all over the town. A street off the main bazar called Lohiyan was exclusively inhabited by ironware manufacturers and dealers. The bulk of Dhampur’s exports consisted of sugar, handloom cloth and milled rice, while major imports were mill-woven cloth, machinery, food grains, metals, minerals, cotton yarn, and consumer and luxury goods. Farmers did not have good storage facilities in the villages and most agricultural commodities were sold soon after harvesting. Grain traders and agents of rice mills went to the villages to buy grain at the time of harvest. Only a few large farmers took their surplus produce to the nearest grain mandis located at Dhampur or Nagina towns.
Badi Mandi. Photograph by Shubham Kashyap
Grain trading has also undergone significant shifts. Sugarcane has been the main crop in the region since the 1930s when the earliest sugar mills were established. Comparing recent years to the late 1970s, the price of sugarcane has increased significantly, which encourages farmers to cultivate more sugarcane. As a result, there is a huge decline in the food grain production. Farmers now grow small portions of food grains like wheat and paddy for their self-consumption. Only about 1 per cent of their output of these grains is sold directly in the Dhampur’s Badi Mandi. Consequently, grain traders are now purchasing branded packed grain and other food products like flour directly from factories in other parts of Uttar Pradesh and other states of India. Alongside this shift, technological changes have also taken place. There are now Japanese grain cleaning machines that remove small pieces of stones from the grain. Firms like Chote Lal Rajeev Kumar Jain, established in 1978, run a wholesale business of food grains. They purchase grains mostly from factories located in Delhi, Saharanpur, Bijnor and Gajraula. About 50 per cent of their buyers are from Dhampur town and 50 per cent from the tehsil.
At present, Dhampur’s trade has multiplied manifold making it a major trading center in the district. Serving around five hundred nearby villages and towns, Dhampur now deals with multiple trade activities from agricultural products to metal, fabric, electronic goods, and a number of consumer goods. There are around fifteen markets and approximately two thousand shops with mixed trade activities. The historic core of the town has become even denser and continues to be the main center of trade. However, there are examples of spatial dispersal of some of the trading activities towards the periphery of the town with wider roads where trucks can turn and unload easily. For example, the vegetable and fruit trade has shifted out from the Badi Mandi in the core town to the New Sabji Mandi on Nehtaur road in the west of the town. It is established on private land taken on lease from the farmers. It is spread over 6.25 acres and has 55 shops of similar size with wide streets that allow trucks to enter. The Nai Sabji Mandi and Fal Association manages the Mandi and also collects a monthly rent from the traders. A similar Sabji and FalMandi has come up adjacent to the Nai Mandi, which indicates a complete shift of the fruit and vegetable wholesale market from the core town. The traders purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi and they sell their products to wholesalers who come from different parts of district Bijnor. The Badi Mandi continues dealing with grain trade specializing now in packed grains and other food products. The Lohiyan market is still inhabited by ironware manufacturers and dealers, where people especially from hilly areas come to buy metal-made products such as kadhai and tawa. The outer areas of the town have also seen the emergence of new kinds of trades such as dealing with branded clothing, footwear, televisions, cars, two-wheelers, tractors, medicines and other consumer goods.
Nai Sabji and Phal Mandi. Photograph by Pushpa Pathak
The major transformation in trade is visible in the import of automobiles and two wheelers. Multiple automobile showrooms have come up in Dhampur. For example, Shakumbari Automobiles, a Maruti Suzuki showroom opened in 2016, imports cars from different states of India including Haryana and Gujarat. Every year, in the lean season it sells about 20-25 cars, and in the peak season sales rise to 30-40. Around 60 per cent of the buyers are from Dhampur town and 40 per cent from Dhampur tehsil. Many cars are purchased by farmers for their daughters’ marriages, where gifting a vehicle has become a symbol of status. Only a small minority of 4-5 per cent buy cars without any social occasion. The showroom now faces competition from other automobile brands, which shows that Dhampur’s demand has risen and people prefer to have a choice.
The textile trade has also transformed remarkably over the past five decades. Now there are fewer shops selling cloth and many more shops have come up selling readymade garments for men, women and children. One such shop is Leela Shadi and Suits, established in 2015, which has transformed from a small-scale to a large-scale firm. About 80 per cent of their dresses are purchased from Surat and Ahmedabad, while the rest 20 per cent comes from Delhi. Around 80 per cent of the buyers are from Dhampur town, 10 per cent are from Dhampur tehsil, and the remaining 10 per cent come from other parts of the district such as Seohara, Nagina, Noorpur and nearby villages. Most of their customers come for the purchase of clothes for marriage purposes. After Covid, their regular customers declined due to shopping from online platforms.
The journey from the congested central street of 1979-80 to the multi-layered trade network of 2023-24 is a story not just of economic change but also of how a small town redefines what it means to live and do business in the present subaltern urban India. Dhampur continues to serve as a vital market center for its rural hinterland and other nearby small towns now plugged into a wider network of trade, industry, technology and developmental aspirations.
We condole the passing of Ambassador Eric Gonsalves, former Chairperson of CPR’s Governing Board from 2015 to 2019.
Joining the Indian Foreign Service in 1950, he was among the earliest recruits of Independent India. He played a pivotal role in driving India’s foreign diplomacy and institution-building at a time when the nation was navigating the Cold War and charting its own course.
During his illustrious career, he served as Ambassador to Japan, to Belgium, the European Economic Community and Luxembourg, as Minister (Political) at the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C., and as Secretary (East) at the Ministry of External Affairs, among other eminent positions.
He remained closely engaged with public institutions well after his formal diplomatic career, serving as Director of the India International Centre and President of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. His wisdom, integrity, and spirit of generosity left a lasting impression on all who had the privilege of working with him.
As Chairperson of CPR’s Governing Board, he played a vital role in upholding the finest traditions of democratic debate and free enquiry, nurturing CPR as one of the most respected institutions in the country for independent policy research and discussion.
The CPR community, its Governing Board, President, faculty and staff, pay tribute to the memory of an inspiring institutional leader who steered CPR with dignity, refinement and sagacity.
We extend our sincere condolences to his family and loved ones and join them in this time of grief.
Imagine the sun setting over an open field, a film projector being set up, a screen being tied between poles by two young men, and as the night sky darkens a large number of men and children taking their seats on the ground for an evening of entertainment. Tickets were cheap at around four to four-and-a-half annas (around 28 paise in today’s decimal Rupee system) drawing a sizable audience. Even a larger number of people watching from a distance with a mix of curiosity, resistance, moral anxiety and the draw of the screen. This was a typical night out to cinema in and around Dhampur, a small town in Western Uttar Pradesh, where touring cinema was introduced in the mid-1950s. Avtar Singh, now a prominent citizen of Dhampur, was one of those two young men screening films in the open-air theaters.
The story of Dhampur’s cinema culture is inseparable from the life journey of Avtar Singh, a man whose family came from their ancestral village in Shakargarh tehsil, Narowal district, Punjab province, in today’s Pakistan. Like countless families during the Partition of 1947, his kin were split by an arbitrary border. Their land, property and some family members remained on the other side, while a part of the family was resettled in Gurdaspur district of Indian Punjab. Avtar Singh completed his graduation from Gurdaspur. Then he followed his elder brother to district Bijnor, where his brother was already involved in running a touring cinema showing films in the open air temporarily in different locations.
Dr. Pushpa Pathak (Senior Visiting Fellow, CPR) in conversation with Avtar Singh
Recognizing that cinema needed a more permanent and respectable space, in 1958 Avtar Singh and his brother shifted from touring cinema to a rented hall in Dhampur. This hall came to be known as Basant Talkies, the first permanent cinema hall in the town. This move marked an important transition, from touring shows to institutionalized entertainment at a landmark location in the map of the town.
In the initial years, the days of institutionalized cinema were uncertain. There were days when no audience turned up “no man, no show”. But Avtar Singh continued popularizing cinema, gradually experimenting with programming and show timings. Early screenings focused on stunt films and later on social and family-oriented films titles such as Mother India, Naagin, Anarkali, Mughal-e-Azam etc.
The turning point for cinema in Dhampur came in the early 1970s with large infrastructure projects in the region, particularly the construction of the Kalagarh and Harevli dams. These projects attracted thousands of workers from outside the town. Dhampur’s railway station became a crucial node for the labour movement, and the town’s economy expanded rapidly. For migrant workers living away from families, cinema was one of the few affordable forms of entertainment. Basant Talkies benefited directly from this demographic shift. Show numbers increased from one show a day to two, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s, three or more shows on weekends.
In small towns like Dhampur, cinema is not just about films. It is about acceptance of a new form of entertainment and aspirations of the people to be modern. It is not only a major form of mass entertainment but also a marker of social change. According to Avtar Singh, the Dhampur society at that time was hardly receptive to cinema. Films were looked upon with suspicion as something immoral. Respectable families hesitated to watch films and women never went to the cinema.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Dhampur’s cinema story is how deliberately it was used to negotiate social change. During the 1960s, Avtar Singh introduced special “lady shows” and children’s shows. Religious and social films were screened specifically to encourage women’s attendance, making it easier for families to send their daughters accompanied by mothers. Flat ticket rates, removed class distinctions inside the hall, also making it more affordable.
In a town where women’s presence in public spaces was minimal in the early 1960s, cinema became one of the first socially sanctioned reasons for women to step out. What began as mothers escorting their children to see films transformed into women going out to enjoy cinema for themselves. Cinema, in this sense, functioned as a quiet social reform trigger for normalizing women’s visibility outside the home and asserting their right to entertainment.
At present, Dhampur has two functioning cinema halls namely; Sheela Talkies, established in 1977 and Bansal Cinema in 1979. According to Umesh Bansal, the owner of Bansal Cinema, the audience turnout has steadily declined over the years. A noticeable exception is during festivals such as Eid and Diwali, when films starring Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan get released and shows run to full capacity. Outside these festival windows, however, the halls rarely witness a full house. Ticket prices range between ₹100 and ₹200, and are not seen as high-price. A key reason for the decline of the audience is the growing dominance of television and OTT platforms, which have transformed viewing habits and expectations. OTT platforms offer a wider variety of content; web series, regional films, shorter formats etc., which are more attractive to the younger audiences than mainstream theater-based cinema releases. The convenience of watching films at home where viewers can pause, resume, or abandon content at their will has begun to replace the fixed, time-bound outside home experience. Cinema, once a shared social outing for families and groups of men and women, has increasingly become an individual and private form of entertainment.
Bansal Cinema, Dhampur; Source: Google Map Images
What makes Avtar Singh’s story compelling is not only that he helped establish cinema culture in Dhampur, but that he did so without inherited capital or land. Subsequently, he also became a successful businessman who owns a shop selling readymade garments and footwear. His journey from a Partition-affected family that lost all their property in 1947 to becoming a cultural entrepreneur in a small Indian town by the late 1950s reflects a broader post-Partition narrative of rebuilding lives through education, enterprise and upward social mobility.
Cinema, in this story, is not just a business. It is a lens through which we can see changing attitudes towards leisure, gender, morality, and public space. In Dhampur, the flicker of a projector helped loosen social boundaries, brought women into public view, and offered migrant workers a sense of pause in an otherwise harsh working life.
Today, when multiplexes dominate urban landscapes and single-screen theatres struggle to survive, stories like Basant Talkies remind us that cinema once played a much larger social role. In towns like Dhampur, it was a bridge between past and present, between private homes and public life, and between a displaced past across the border and a rooted future in a new town.
The Centre for Policy Research turned fifty in November 2023. As we celebrate this special milestone, we present some snippets of our impact on the Indian policy sphere over the years in various areas of research.
This edition of Policy in Action is dedicated to showcasing the various public engagement platforms that we have built over the years, by ourselves as an institution, as well as in partnership with other organizations.
Policy research and public engagement go hand in hand, and there is a growing need for cross-disciplinary, global platforms where policy issues, cooperation and expertise can be in dialogue to provide more effective solutions to policy challenges.
CPR’s platforms have ranged from a cross-disciplinary forum like CPR Dialogues, which brings CPR faculty from various initiatives and disciplines together with world leaders on one platform; to more specific subject centric conversations, such as Accountability Initiative’s PULSE for Development, Initiative of Cities, Economy and Society’s CPR-CSH workshops, Politics Initiative’s How India Votes series and several other initiatives.
Here’s a snapshot of our key work on creating platforms of public engagement over the years:
CPR Dialogues
Hosted and organised by the Centre for Policy Research, CPR Dialogues is an annual public forum where leading policy practitioners, academics, and thought leaders address the most critical policy issues of our times. CPR Dialogues provides a platform for locating debates and challenges in India within a global perspective, allowing key stakeholders to engage with and learn from each other. The first and second editions of CPR Dialogues were held in 2019 and 2020. The third edition of CPR Dialogues was held in 2022 and featured over 60 speakers and 20 panels.
PULSE for Development
In 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Avani Kapur co-founded the PULSE (Platform to Understand, Learn, Share and Exchange) for Development which brought together practitioners, researchers, and funders in the development sector to understand the situation and through this knowledge mitigate the impact of the crisis on human lives. It is currently incubated in the Accountability Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research. In 2022, a conscious decision was made to also include longstanding development challenges facing India and facilitate the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The community currently comprises over 114 organisations and more than 230 individual members. These members include IAS officers, State Cadre officers, national and local civil society organisations, development practitioners, research organisations, and funders. A key feature of this platform is its Coffee Chat sessions, informal online discussions tailored to explore and advance solutions for complex welfare issues in India.
Since its formation in 2020, PULSE for Development has hosted 28 Coffee Chat sessions. These discussions cover a range of welfare-related subjects, spanning Gender and Livelihood, Migration and Migrants, Reducing Vulnerabilities including in difficult geographies, Disability Issues, Inclusive Development and Post-COVID 19 Challenges, Education, and Health and Healthcare, Nutrition, Family Planning, and Governance.
CPR-CSH Workshops
The CPR-CSH monthly urban workshop series, which organized its 166th event last month, was set in motion by a rather spontaneous event in February 2010. It was soon after Marie-Helene Zerah, who is now Visiting Senior Fellow at CPR, had taken charge of research on urban dynamics at the Centre for Human Sciences in New Delhi, and discussed a joint seminar series over a coffee meeting with CPR Senior Fellow Partha Mukhopadhyay. An occasion arose immediately to host eminent French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, and with the only available slot being on a Tuesday afternoon, the tradition of a workshop on ‘urban’ issues on the last Tuesday of every month was born.
Over the years, the CPR conference room, where the series is usually hosted, has emerged as an energetic space for discussions around urban politics, housing, governance, social dynamics, environmental issues, and more. Through this journey, the CPR-CSH collaboration has provided a bridge for French scholars to engage deeply with Indian urbanists, and has also provided a robust platform for visiting scholars from around the world and from various Indian institutions to share their ongoing work.
In September 2019, we celebrated CPR-CSH’s centenary with a panel discussion reflecting on the field of urban studies in India. The onset of Covid in March 2020 meant a pivot to digital events, and led to the participation of global scholars through online webinars. Today, nearly 14 years since it first started, the CPR-CSH workshop continues to be a watering hole for everyone curious about urban issues, and an enduring space for dialogue and exchange.
How India Votes
With an aim to create dialogue around voter and election behavior in India, the Politics Initiative at CPR started a conversation series in 2023 called “How India votes: 24 conversations in the run-up to the 2024 elections”. The conversations put a focus on the topics most concerning the Indian electorate and are moderated by Rahul Verma.
The series aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of how Indian citizens engage in the electoral arena. Each conversation explores one theme in detail, with leading experts in the field. Our hope is that this series will interest a wide range of audience as India heads for its 18th general elections in 2024. You can watch the previous conversations click here.
CPR-CWC Dialogue Forum (TREAD Talks)
CPR-CWC Dialogue Forum is a collaborative activity between CPR and the Central Water Commission (CWC), pursued under the MoU between the Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS) and the CPR to establish the MoJS Research Chair – Water Conflicts and Governance at CPR. It is a forum where CPR’s research interests and CWC’s practitioner perspectives converge to discuss, debate and critically engage with contemporary water policy governance challenges. It has particular interests in interstate river water disputes and transboundary river water governance.
The Forum is also a space to network and engage with wider groups of stakeholders for a vibrant policy discourse. It hosts distinguished scholars, practitioners and civic society actors to share their research and experiences. These interactions are organized as talks, targeted consultations (focused on specific issues), and dissemination workshops.
The talk series organized by the Forum are promoted as TREAD Talks, after the program that the MoJS Research Chair leads: TREADs (Transboundary Rivers, Ecologies and Development studies). TREAD Talks have so far addressed a variety of issues and themes.
India and the World
As part of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, a special celebration organized by the Government of India to commemorate the 75th year of India’s Independence, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) launched a flagship lecture series titled, ‘India and the World’. The series brought together distinguished speakers who have had a long and deep engagement with the country to understand their perspectives on India’s global relationships and how the world understands and engages with India – our history, our democracy, our economy and our society. This series sought to bring a global perspective into dialogue with India with the objective of celebrating the country, its role in global governance and articulating a pathway in the new, shifting geopolitical landscape.
Chaired by Honorary CPR fellow and former Indian Foreign Secretary Amb Shyam Saran, and featured a number of brilliant speakers from across the globe such as Peter Varghese, Nabil Fahmy, Ibrahim Gambari, Tshering Tobgay and many more. Ending in August 2022, as India completed its 75th year of independence, the series and its conversations remain a pivotal resource in understanding the global issues of our times.
To know more about CPR’s engagement with public platforms you can visit our website at https://cprindia.org/
Stay tuned for our next pop-up edition of Policy in Action, coming soon!
On 10th January 2024, CPR received a notice from the Ministry of Home Affairs cancelling its FCRA status. The basis of this decision is incomprehensible and disproportionate, and some of the reasons given challenge the very basis of the functioning of a research institution. This includes the publication on our website of policy reports emanating from our research being equated with current affairs programming.
During the tenure of our suspension, we sought and obtained interim redress from the honourable Delhi High Court and will continue to seek recourse in all avenues possible.
This cancellation comes after a decision to suspend the FCRA status in February 2023. These actions followed an Income Tax “survey” that took place in September 2022. The actions have had a debilitating impact on the institution’s ability to function by choking all sources of funding. This has undermined the institution’s ability to pursue its well established objective of producing high quality, globally recognised research on policy matters, which it has been recognised for over its 50 years’ existence. During this time the institution has been home to some of the country’s most distinguished academics, diplomats and policymakers.
CPR is a 50-year-old institution that has a proud legacy of deep contributions to India’s policy making ecosystem, and over the past five decades has been home to many distinguished faculty, researchers and members of the board.
CPR firmly reiterates that it is in complete compliance with the law, and has been cooperating fully and exhaustively at every step of the process. We remain steadfast in our belief that this matter will be resolved in line with constitutional values and guarantees.
This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Neelanjan Sircar, a Senior Fellow at CPR, who has brought a combination of data analysis and qualitative research to a wide range of subjects including India’s political economy, urbanisation and climate change.
Following degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics, Sircar received a PhD in political science from Columbia University and then carried out research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Centre for the Advanced Study of India before making his way to CPR.
At CPR, Sircar was instrumental in setting up the Politics Initiative, which provides high-quality research of India’s political economy from a non-partisan lens, helping us build nuanced models of why voters make their choices and how political parties operate within the broader system.
He is also co-editor of Colossus; The Anatomy of Delhi, a volume that seeks to unpack the complexity of India’s national capital region, building on a survey of the city that could serve as a model for other sampling efforts across the country. Sircar has also led CPR’s project to evaluate the welfare delivery systems of the Andhra Pradesh government.
In this conversation with Sircar, we spoke about making the move from applied mathematics to the policy world, what convinced him to come work in India and why the approach that undergirds CPR’s Politics Initiative is important. We also spoke about building frameworks and tools that other researchers can replicate, why scholars can benefit from working with governments and why it is important to look beyond India when considering complex research questions.
You can listen to the entire conversation as a podcast here, or read the whole transcript now.
(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).
Let’s start at the very beginning and get a sense of how you made your way into the policy world.
I very much stumbled into policy. I had a degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics. I was working in startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was not too happy with the business environment and there was a lot of fluctuation in the economy back then. So I went back for postgraduate studies. At that time I only had a Math background. So I actually learned Statistics only after I joined postgraduate study and started a PhD in Political Science in New York at Columbia University. Initially, I was actually interested in income inequality, mainly in Western Europe and it’s only a couple of years into my PhD that I switched to thinking about India more seriously. And then one thing led to another. I became interested in a certain set of policy questions and political questions, did a post-doctoral fellowship at the University Of Pennsylvania at the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI), and then from there I found my way to CPR.
How did you go from looking at Maths and Economics to politics?
There was certainly always an intellectual interest. I, like many others, was interested in economic problems. And yet so many people look at the questions purely in a technical manner and so much of what is unsaid is that it is actually a political, policy decision. And so starting to think a little bit about the intersection between policy decisions, economic decisions and political realities is something that really started to make me think about whether I should go on and study Mathematics or Economics. It’s very natural for somebody like me who had an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Berkeley to go on and do a PhD in Economics. But when push came to shove I didn’t think that Economics would serve my interest. I thought Political Science would serve me better.
Did you face pushback in making that switch? Was it a straightforward choice for you or was it something that you laboured over?
I laboured over it quite a bit. At the time of applying for my Ph.D., I was considering programmes in Statistics, Sociology and Political Science. I was interested in a number of social science disciplines and I was interested in what was happening in Applied Statistics at the time and what would sort of merge the two. One of the challenges that economists have traditionally faced and continue to face, but it’s been mitigated somewhat, is that many of the modern developments in Applied Statistics have yet to find their way into economics. Particularly at the time that I entered my PhD, there were exciting new tools that were being used in the analysis of social behaviour and political behaviour that hadn’t quite found their way into economics yet. So that made it particularly attractive to join a PhD in Political Science.
And similarly, what made you make that switch from looking at Europe to thinking about India?
The first couple of years in the PhD, I was doing very very abstract work. I was interested in questions of how capitalism is changing, how economic structures are changing and I wanted something that was a lot more relatable to the average person. At Columbia, I met Milan Vaishnav who is well known now and was a couple of years ahead of me. Actually he was studying Latin American politics at the time. So neither of us were engaged in South Asia. We were both sent to work at CSDS in Delhi in 2007.
At that point, I saw a different world. I saw a number of important empirical and theoretical questions that needed to be investigated and like Milan, I also very quickly switched my focus to India. Today we have many Political Economy scholars focused on India, but at that time it hadn’t quite come to the point that it has today. So there were a lot of questions to ask. It was an exciting time and an exciting place to investigate very very different questions.
This wasn’t a ninety-degree turn away from the Applied Mathematics that you studied earlier. You built on those approaches as you moved towards Political Science and towards India.
Anybody who very closely looks at my work over the last fifteen years will see a sort of evolution. At the time of my PhD, my earliest paper was a very abstract paper on Network Theory. The second used new ideas in statistical estimation. And my final paper was actually what ended up becoming the most influential for me, which was thinking about how family networks in West Bengal changed people’s political preferences in the 2011 election when Mamata Banerjee first came to power.
I was shifting from this very abstract framework to a much more grounded framework. The idea that animated my entire thesis at the time was how ideas of personal networks and social networks affect the ideas of politics and economics. That’s still something that flows through a lot of my work, thinking about networks and thinking about space, but I would like to think in a far more applied and grounded way than fifteen years ago.
Once the PhD was done, tell us about how you then eventually made your way to India and CPR.
I had very little interest in staying in academia. I had always imagined that I would go into the corporate world. But I knew that once you start in the corporate world, you’re very unlikely to come back to academia. I had spoken to Devesh Kapur who at that point was the head of CASI at the University of Pennsylvania. He said that if you’re interested in working on India, we should see if we can do some things together. I spent two years at CASI and it was absolutely fundamental in my shift towards studying policy and my understanding of India. In the middle of my time at CASI, I started two projects which I think would evolve into the things that I’m still working on today.
One was that, during my time at CASI, the 2014 election happened and Modi was elected to power. I did a number of analyses that were statistics-based and numbers-based around the 2014 election and those became somewhat influential in the universe of studying elections. That created a wing of research in which we tried to understand how the voter behaves in India.
The second project that I started at CASI was a study of urban space in general, but the National Capital Region (NCR) in Delhi in particular. That research work would eventually become my first book co-edited with Sanjoy Chakravorty, which is called Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi. It’s essentially a social study of Delhi. In many ways, my couple of years in CASI set my agenda for the next several years.
While I was there, I became much more interested in all things India and I met with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who at that point was the head of CPR. I’ll always remember what he told me. I was considering what to do next and he said ‘You can go into the working world, you can stay in the US. You probably won’t make as much money if you go to India. But the one thing I can guarantee is that if you go and you take it seriously, your marginal value in the Indian context is greater than it would be if you just joined the corporate world.’ And it’s something that stuck with me. I mean those are the kinds of things you want to hear. So then I said let me try it and in August 2015, I ended up at CPR.
Just to expand on that a little bit for listeners to get a sense of what he was saying, what did he mean?
The imagination of what would happen when I came is that we would be able to apply some of the Applied Statistics questions that I had already started working on and some of the understanding that I had of politics and policy in the Indian context. Some of the theoretical traditions I was drawing on were quite different than what existed in India at the time. The other thing that I became known for within CPR is that I was studying political behaviour and voting behaviour but not from the standpoint of having a predetermined ideological position or predisposition to one party, but more trying to understand the structural elements of politics. That’s what would eventually become the Politics Initiative.
Indeed, and the point being that often your impact when working in a corporate space is much more specific whereas in India it could be more wide-ranging. Still, is there a part of you that still wants to go see what it’s like in the corporate world?
I mean every time you look at your bank balance every one of us wonders whether we should look at the corporate world. But other than that I am very satisfied with the choice that I made. It was an unorthodox choice. It was not in the standard playbook that somebody who had been studying in the West would come back to India and take up a position in policy and political science. Of course, it had been done before. I’m certainly not the first, but the scale of people coming back to India was very very low and there was a very small number of us. We all knew each other. Numbers would increase as many of these new colleges and institutions came into being.
What I have been able to be a part of, in my last eight years in India and the different sorts of movement and different pieces of intellectual growth I’ve been a part of, certainly would not have happened if I stayed in a corporate setting but it also wouldn’t have happened had I stayed in the US or gone to Europe in an academic setting. The pace of intellectual growth and the intellectual shifts over the last decade in India is extraordinary. And unless you take part in it firsthand you don’t see what is possible here.
As you made your way to CPR, let’s look at these two strains emerging out of your projects at CASI separately. Tell us about the work on politics.
I came to India in August 2015. The Bihar state election was just around the corner. I had a few months to sort of figure out what I wanted to do and so just a month later, in late September I went to Bihar with my colleague who was at CPR at the time, Ashish Ranjan. And we were working alongside Bhanu Joshi who was also at that time at CPR. The three of us formed a group and despite my reputation as an applied stats researcher, my own view is that you really can’t study politics in India and you really cannot study the voter unless the vast majority of your work is qualitative in nature. You can look at the data that you’ll get from some survey or from election results. But you can’t make sense of it unless you really spend a lot of time on the ground.
And so I spent about six weeks in Bihar and went to every district. I spent a fair amount of time and developed a set of techniques. People look at our qualitative work sometimes and the reports that have come out of the work that we’ve done and it looks like we’re just kind of wandering around but nothing could be further from the truth. What we’re actually doing is that we’re trying to put together data sources in the background — of previous election results and demographics. We are trying to essentially figure out what places we want to visit to understand how certain communities vote or how certain competitive seats might vote. When we aggregate it together, we develop a picture of what’s happening in the state.
The process of how it became a major initiative is also a bit of an accident. What happened at that time is that a lot of newspapers were going through an aggressive stretch of cuts to what they call stringers. Basically, people who are district-level and specialised journalists, and very knowledgeable, were suddenly gone. So overnight a lot of the newspapers lost a lot of their local knowledge. I had actually written for The Hindu for various other things and at that time I got a call from the person who was coordinating the elections coverage, who would eventually become the main editor of the newspaper saying ‘would you consider as a part of your own work just writing a couple of pieces for us because we don’t have anyone to write on Bihar?’
So we did that and having academic-oriented people writing in the newspaper turned out to be quite popular. Having people making reference to theory and numbers turned out to be quite popular. And by sheer dumb luck that was an election where all of the electoral polls predicted a sweep for the BJP. And we were quite steadfast in saying that is not what we’re seeing on the ground. In fact, we’re seeing the opposite and it turned out that we were right and the polls were wrong. And so overnight, due to a series of historical accidents this kind of work got a lot of notice, as well as the academic method behind it. So, after one or two more elections of working like this, it became what is today known as the Politics Initiative. Of course today, it’s led by Rahul Verma who’s ended up taking it even further and doing amazing work.
You mentioned earlier that approaching political science from this non-partisan view was a key point. Could you tell me about why it was different from what came before?
There is a strange problem we have in the study of electoral politics in India. The most fertile time we actually have is the period before the Emergency. A huge number of people were writing about the ‘Congress System,’ about the various ways in which voters make decisions, and about how caste and elections intersect. But partially because of the kind of activism that happened around the Emergency, and partially because some of the scholars became less interested in elections post-Emergency, we have much less of that work now. It gets revived somewhat on television, oddly enough. Prannoy Roy and Yogendra Yadav do extraordinary work to bring electoral analysis back into the consciousness. I had done work with Yogendra Yadav during my PhD, and had met many of these people before I joined CPR.
That was formative for me in thinking about where things had to go. Still, the demands of television media would require a certain kind of masala in analysing elections. The kind of structural elements – when do voters care about their caste? When are voters being strategic? At what point do voters care about an economic benefit? At what point do they care about religion? – these are dry structural questions that have fundamental impacts on electoral outcomes. Once we got the green light to start investigating these sorts of things and we saw that there was a genuine readership for this, we began to realise that there was really an opportunity for what I call this unbiased nonpartisan method of analysing elections.
Taking up the TV point. You’re often taking your work to TV and into newspapers, whereas many academics prefer the confines of the academy. Is that a deliberate effort you’ve made, or do you like that sort of writing?
If I’m being brutally honest, I do not like doing television and even newspapers can be challenging just because of the timelines. I enjoy writing for newspapers, but it’s not the way that academics typically work. But early on, I understood that these different forms of media are themselves another form of academic communication today. There are academics who reach out to me and want to know about voting behaviour, want to think about political behaviour in India on the basis of having seen me on NDTV or having read me in the Hindustan Times. Now you know I can point them to an academic paper but it is true that if you make relatively academic arguments perhaps in a 10-second version rather than an article version, it does have a reach even among scholars.
Had I just been writing academic papers, a very narrow set of people would have been my constituents, my readership and I wouldn’t have to engage more broadly with other scholarly people. That changes once you start engaging with the media and given that I was in a nascent space, the set of people I was speaking to purely in academic terms is actually very small and some of this cross-fertilization with journalists [was beneficial]. Many journalists are doing very very good technical work in newspapers and doing this kind of analysis across India. Many of the young scholars who, in their PhDs, are doing this kind of work and doing it perhaps better than I ever could have but a lot of it comes from just the pure exposure that media gives. And I have to give credit to many of these media outfits for their willingness to give space to people like us so that we are read by our broader audience.
So you set up the Politics Initiative, which Rahul is now running. You continue to do work on the subject, from writing papers like the Politics of Vishwas to looking at other questions about how voters decide. Where does your work on Indian elections and politics stand today? What are the questions occupying your thinking?
I think the big prize for me always was and continues to be what I mentioned, which is that we don’t have the kind of broad sweep analysis that we require on Indian politics post-Emergency. It’s quite strange right? Much of what even academics cite in the post-Emergency are one-off articles. The Politics of Vishwas might be one. Or Second Democratic Upsurge by Yogendra Yadav might be another. But these are just articles. There are no book length treatments. There’s no go-to text for a postgraduate seminar on the kind of political development that you have in the 1980s and onwards. What we do have is very good investigations of the rise of Hindu nationalism, Mandal politics, or what happened to the Congress Party. But those are all separate lines of inquiry and what I always try to sort of encourage people to think more about is that whatever your line of inquiry was, many of these parties that came up in the 1990s look very similar. They have a charismatic leader at the top, they are often family-controlled. It might be a caste-based party. It might be a Congress breakaway. But they all look very similar and we had a huge proliferation of these parties in the 1990s.
So, we know that there are certain structural elements that are looking quite common from the 1990s onward in Indian politics. Some parts of it we’re starting to get bothered by. We also have seen a rise of criminality, we’ve seen a rise of cash in politics. What is driving all of these things? Is there a common story? Is there a common way in which we can characterise what was happening in the Indian political system in the 1990s and perhaps the changes have taken place today? These are the questions that continue to animate my work and I think that where my thinking has gone is to take some of these earlier investigations of the Indian voter along with the more abstract notions of religion and politics, the Modi Voter, etc., and try to actually now build a larger theory of what are the kinds of parties that are formed in the Indian system: How much inter-party democracy do they have? How do they appeal to the voter? And how might we characterise the overall equilibrium in the Indian party system? This is what animates me today.
The Centre for Policy Research turns fifty this year. Fifty years in the service of Indian policymaking, of keeping a robust conversation between the government, policymakers and the Indian populace alive – this is indeed a moment of pride and reflection for us. As we celebrate this special milestone, we present some snippets of our impact on the Indian policy sphere over the years in various areas of research.
This edition of Policy in Action, is dedicated to our work on Land Rights. The bulk of CPR’s work in this area is attributed to the Land Rights Initiative which was launched in 2014. Even today, almost 60 percent of all Indians are directly dependent upon land for their livelihoods. Land is not just an economic resource; it is also central to individual dignity and community identity, history, and culture. Land reforms were crucial not only to India’s economic development but also to its political independence and social redistribution story. The Indian Constitution adopted in 1950, safeguarded land rights of Scheduled Tribes, and through the inclusion of the fundamental right to property in Article 19(1) (f), guaranteed equal property rights to all Indians, including women and Dalits or Scheduled Castes for the first time.
However, as the development agenda played out over the following decades, there was a gradual demise of the right to property through a series of constitutional amendments between 1951 and 1978. Particularly vulnerable were the Scheduled Tribes, which constitute only 8.6% of India’s population but constitute nearly 40% of those displaced between 1950 and 1999, many of them twice in one lifetime due to dams, mines, wildlife parks, and sanctuaries. This widespread development-induced displacement has led to persistent and ubiquitous legal and extra-legal conflict over land, plaguing the lives of people across millions of hectares of land and threatening investments worth billions of dollars.
Here’s a snapshot of CPR’s work on Land Rights over the years:
In 2017, CPR’s Land Rights Initiative (LRI) published a research report on Land Acquisition in India: A Review of Supreme Court Cases from 1950 to 2016 (CPR: 2017). This Report constituted a first-time-ever comprehensive attempt to analyse all judicial decisions by the Supreme Court on land acquisition. This Report has been used extensively by the Department of Land Resources in the Ministry of Rural Development and has been used in training and capacity-building programmes by the National Highways Authority of India and the National Institute for Defence Estates Management. The Report has also been used widely by individual litigants defending their lands against governmental acquisition. That this Report is now the authoritative text on land acquisition is evident from the fact that it was cited by opposing parties, both the government and farmers, before the Supreme Court Constitution bench in Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal and others (2020).
In 2018, LRI published a research report on The Legal Regime and Political Economy of Land Rights of Scheduled Tribes in Scheduled Areas of India (CPR:2018). This Report for the first time mapped the Scheduled Areas and plotted the forest cover and mines in India to show a significant overlap with the Scheduled Areas. Recommendations from this Report, and the National Seminar on Understanding Landlessness and Displacement of, and Atrocities against Scheduled Tribes co-organised by LRI and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) in 2018, and the 2020 NCST report on Tribal Land Alienation in India, for which Dr. Namita Wahi served as an expert advisor, were incorporated into NCST’s Annual report (2019-2020) under Article 338A of the Constitution. NCST’s Annual Report was sent to the President of India in early 2021.
Consolidating our Land Rights work over a five-year period, the policy brief on Understanding Land Conflict in India: Suggestions for Reform (2019) highlighted conflicting “people” versus “state” narratives over land which in turn had led to over a thousand colonial and post-colonial laws and administrative practices.
The absence of a publicly available comprehensive database of land laws greatly hampered citizen access to the laws that govern one of the most important aspects of our lives. The desire to fill this gap is what birthed LRI’s most ambitious project called One Thousand Land Laws: Mapping Indian Land Laws. Conceptualised and executed over a period of five years, this project involves an attempt to create a comprehensive, exploratory archive of all land laws in India, a veritable “google maps for land laws”. Last year, we launched the web and mobile versions of this website, accessible at landlawsofindia.org
For their work in creating citizen awareness and deepening democracy, in 2020, LRI was one of fifteen organisations shortlisted for the inaugural Shamnad Basheer Citizenship Prize, which recognises organisations transforming the field of law and justice.
LRI’s research papers have informed courses and curricula across law schools and social science programmes, and LRI’s internship programme has nurtured an entire generation of students in research on this complex subject. As the pioneering institution in the land policy space, LRI has also nurtured the land policy ecosystem by supporting the work of land policy initiatives at other research institutions.
Stay tuned for our next pop-up edition of Policy in Action, coming soon!
STATEMENT
January 17th, 2024
On 10th January 2024, CPR received a notice from the Ministry of Home Affairs cancelling its FCRA status. The basis of this decision is incomprehensible and disproportionate, and some of the reasons given challenge the very basis of the functioning of a research institution. This includes the publication on our website of policy reports emanating from our research being equated with current affairs programming.
During the tenure of our suspension, we sought and obtained interim redress from the honourable Delhi High Court and will continue to seek recourse in all avenues possible.
This cancellation comes after a decision to suspend the FCRA status in February 2023. These actions followed an Income Tax “survey” that took place in September 2022. The actions have had a debilitating impact on the institution’s ability to function by choking all sources of funding. This has undermined the institution’s ability to pursue its well established objective of producing high quality, globally recognised research on policy matters, which it has been recognised for over its 50 years’ existence. During this time the institution has been home to some of the country’s most distinguished academics, diplomats and policymakers.
CPR firmly reiterates that it is in complete compliance with the law, and has been cooperating fully and exhaustively at every step of the process. We remain steadfast in our belief that this matter will be resolved in line with constitutional values and guarantees.
