Archives: Briefs Reports

The final week of the climate negotiations in the lead up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009, ended in Barcelona on November 6th with a deep sense of foreboding. Shakespearean allusions flew thick and fast, with one delegate ending the closing meeting on the fearful note that “something rotten awaits us in the State of Denmark.”

The Central Statistics Office (CSO), the custodian of Indian statistics, has faced a lot of questioning after the release of the new GDP series with 2011-12 as base. The RBI, Ministry of Finance, IMF, several credit rating agencies have all questioned the validity of the revisions. Some analysts like Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley have gone as far as to assert that these revisions if not corrected will make Indian statics as suspect as Chinese GDP data in the past. This will be a real pity. The extent of the revisions is shown in Table 1 below. With the new base year of 2012-13, GDP growth in FY 14 (2013-14) has been revised upwards to 6.6% at factor cost and a whopping 6.9% at market prices. This represents about 2% increase in GDP growth over the earlier estimate of 5%. Surely, such a large scale revision will or should significantly affect the understanding of the underlying economic phenomenon and lead to a marked policy shift. Contrary to what Surjit S Bhalla (SSB) would have us believe, not even the government is taking the revised estimates seriously enough as reflected in a lack of any change in policy direction.

In 1957, India’s central government endowed the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) with a monopoly over planning and development in the capital, including the construction of housing. Today, the Authority owns about a quarter of Delhi’s land and is involved in almost every activity related to land, housing, and infrastructure in the city.

This report finds that while the DDA has been relatively efficient and successful at tasks such as acquiring land and providing high end amenities, it has been extremely slow to accomplish others, like building and allotting low-income housing. The resulting housing shortfall is exacerbated by the fact that the DDA regularly demolishes unplanned settlements on land it controls, often destroying many more housing units than it creates. We trace the DDA’s challenges to two factors. First, the DDA is accountable to the Government of India, not to the local or state governments elected by Delhi’s residents, distancing its accountability structures from the needs of the city. Second, its internal structure is marked by a deep divide between the higher-level management and lower-level implementation staff.

A report of the Cities of Delhi project.

Delhi’s jhuggi jhopri clusters (JJCs), resettlement colonies, and unauthorised colonies are largely without piped water supply. In its absence, residents of these and other informal settlements—estimated to house threequarters of Delhi’s residents1 —have come to rely on a patchwork of alternative water sources, most important among them water tankers and groundwater tubewells. The Delhi Jal Board (DJB), the state government institution responsible for water supply in the majority of the city, has a complicated relationship with these two arrangements, which each represent a combination of sanctioned and informal elements. This report recounts the practical functioning of both systems and explores in detail the role that the DJB has played in their evolution. We find that, although the DJB has made efforts to improve its administration of water tankers and tubewells, the reality on the ground remains one of limited supply and inequitable distribution.

Suggested Citation: Shahana Sheikh, Sonal Sharma, and Subhadra Banda, ‘The Delhi Jal Board: Seeing beyond the Planned’. A report of the Cities of Delhi project, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (April 2015).

Using government reported data, this brief looks closely at the effects of the Fourteenth Finance Commission (FFC) recommendations on state finances in Tamil Nadu, with a particular focus on effects on social sector investments.

The brief asks two key questions:

Did increased tax devolution result in enhancing fiscal space for states?
Has the changed fiscal structure resulted in any visible shifts in social sector investments at the state level?

In July 2011, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) relocated its Washington, D.C. office to a new space designed with a focus on energy efficiency and sustainability. NRDC is an international nonprofit environmental organization committed to protecting the world’s natural resources, public health, and environment.

The energy-efficient new NRDC office has high performance measures which are projected to yield a 30 percent annual energy savings, compared to expected energy use if the office were built to the minimum energy code requirements (ASHRAE 90.1 2007). Over the life of the 15-year lease, NRDC forecasts a net cash flow savings (cumulative energy savings minus initial incremental cost) of $197,871 from the measures. The largest contributor to the project’s energy reduction is the efficient lighting scheme, including the use of daylighting, automated and manual controls, and energy efficient fixtures.

China’s One Belt One Road Initiative has virtually been a lightning rod for divisive debate and a polarised narrative since it was announced in 2013. For India, it has been the proverbial elephant in the room, as it awkwardly swings between willful pretence and wishful erasure. The policy brief looks at the clues this initiative could offer on the likely drivers of China’s economic diplomacy in the region. There could be three signals for India to watch out for. A clear pointer is the growing role of domestic determinants in setting the direction and pace of China’s regional economic engagement. Another pointer could be China’s role in shaping and defining Asia’s new institutional financial architecture. Lastly, the initiative could be a signal of how China is likely to engage with the larger questions of benefit sharing, trade-offs and the allocation of risks and burdens in subregional Asia.

This Brief provides an overview of the new CAQM Act 2021, its strengths and limitations, and the path ahead for enabling airshed level governance in the rest of the country. With many significant questions yet to be deliberated on defining the boundaries of airsheds and designing institutions to govern them, the CAQM template may not necessarily be the most appropriate approach for replicating in other parts of India.

14 April 2014
The process of slum eviction and rehabilitation in Delhi continues to be plagued by serious governance challenges. We identify two broad problems. First, despite the designation of a nodal agency, slum rehabilitation suffers from a lack of coordination, with various government agencies working at cross-purposes. Second, the rights of JJC dwellers who are to be evicted remain ambiguous. There is, in particular, a lack of clarity as to who qualifies for rehabilitation and what the process of eviction is. Moreover, the practices followed on the ground during eviction conflict in many ways with the process outlined in policy and legal documents.

A report of the Cities of Delhi project.