Archives: Briefs Reports

Efficiency is everywhere, but it is an invisible resource and often underutilized. Energy efficiency is the fastest, cleanest, and cheapest way to meet energy needs— India alone could save $42 billion each year by largely improving energy efficiency in buildings, which currently consume more than 30 percent of the country’s electricity. With a projected skyrocketing increase in building-occupied area in India, from 8 billion square meters in 2005 to 41 billion by 2030, any building constructed without optimizing efficiency represents a lost opportunity to lock in energy and cost savings for decades.

Historic blackouts across India in July 2012 revealed the severity of India’s energy crisis. Looking ahead, scaling up energy efficiency promises to be the fastest, cheapest, and cleanest way to help meet India’s energy demands. As the country experiences rapid urbanization and its building- occupied area skyrockets, from 8 billion square meters in 2005 to a projected 41 billion square meters in 2030, the country’s real estate sector is racing to keep up with the demand for high-rise residential housing and commercial properties such as offices, hotels, and malls.1 Incorporating energy-efficiency measures in new and existing buildings will help India achieve a reliable energy future and save money while addressing the threat of climate change. Developers, building owners, and tenants are essential to achieving the energy-efficiency benefits of reduced energy use, cost savings, increased worker productivity, higher asset value, and market advantage.

This case study highlights Godrej Bhavan, an iconic office building in South Mumbai, focusing on the strong business case for energy-efficiency upgrades or retrofits. The Godrej Bhavan retrofit shows that greener, energy-saving retrofits are practical and profitable in India’s rapidly transforming building market and provides replicable practices for cost and energy savings.

A problematic set of binaries stands at the heart of India’s narrative on borders, one that has rendered its political signaling contradictory as well as virtually unintelligible. India’s border fencing project is a stark metaphor of this conflicted discourse, perching uneasily as it were between the feel-good narrative of rethinking borders as bridges on the one hand and an almost pathological fear of open borders on the other. This binary is what characterises India’s schizophrenic subregionalism, a discourse virtually in morbid fear of itself. The paper argues that this twisted logic runs the risk of turning against itself to subvert India’s subregional project itself. Its political fate is also critically linked to the larger question of how India perceives its role in the region and the extent to which it prioritises subregional integration as a regional public good.

A distinction between consultations to obtain a feedback of experiences and concerns around education and policy formulation needs to be made. The feedback from various civil society organisations of conducting consultations at the village and community levels highlight critical issues of representation of voices of the marginalised. Women, people from disadvantaged castes and tribes, economically weak households and other marginalised are unable to voice their opinions. It is mostly the dominant social groups and individuals who are in the position to influence the discussions. Conducting large group discussions in a democratic and participatory ethos also takes time and training of those engaged in carrying out these consultations. Since the range of participants in the field has increased substantively in the past decades, ensuring representations of multiple voices has become much more challenging.

Sanitation access in schools is important to keep children, especially girl children in school. It is also important to spread the culture of safe sanitation more widely, especially among the young. Using a unique mapping of DISE (District Information System for Education) data on 0.94 million schools and Primary Census Abstract (PCA) data on village-level amenities, this brief looks at the variation in school sanitation across the state of Odisha by location and gender and the relationship between access to sanitation in schools and the access to sanitation within households of the block. It finds considerable variation, especially looking across spatial distributions, which need greater focus, going forward. However, access to school sanitation is consistently better than sanitation in the block as a whole.

The success of the Right to Education (RtE) Act depends largely on ensuring accountability at a decentralized level – closer to the people. However, while the Act includes certain provisions that could further this goal, there have been problems of implementation and lack of resources. Coupled with the absence of a grievance redress mechanism within the education system, parents and children have no means of staking a claim to their rights under the Act. The Shiksha Samvad helps to address these challenges, as well as create and fix accountability within the education system. Recommended by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), the Shiksha Samvad can act as a modality to enable constructive engagement between the community and education administration. The Public Accountability and Governance in Education (PAGE) team at CPR is now facilitating the process of implementationShiksha Samvads in the field in a few states such as Rajasthan where the Shiksha Samvad has been institutionalized through government orders. In the process it is also documenting the experiences to enable a tracking of the changes undertaken through this process.

Suggested Citation: Paras Ram Banjara, Kiran Bhatty, Radhika Saraf and Priyanka Varma (2015).Shiksha Samvad (Education Dialogue): Strengthening People’s Engagement with Education. Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Institutions are often distinguished by whether they perform a protective or a promotional role. The NCSC is clearly more of a protective institution, though it does monitor the progress of promotional policy initiatives emanating from other state agencies. While its creation was mandated by the Constitution, neither the responsibility of promoting the welfare of the scheduled castes nor that of protecting them against injustices has been vested exclusively in this institution. Indeed, though it enjoys constitutional status, the recommendations of the Commission are advisory rather than mandatory.

Elementary education policy in India is undergoing an important transition. For decades, the primary goal of the Indian Government’s elementary education policy was to create a universal education system through the provision of school inputs. This resulted in a significant expansion of India’s elementary education infrastructure – enrollment in India is near universal and most states in the country have constructed schools in every habitation. But even as this infrastructure was being put in place, it became increasingly clear that schooling was yet to translate into learning.

In May 2015, Accountability Initiative (AI) published a paper analysing trends in elementary education financing. The paper is based on data collected through AI’s flagship PAISA district surveys. It presents a detailed analysis of the survey findings and proposes an alternative, outcomes based financing system for elementary education in the country.

In 2013-14, Accountability Initiative(AI) was tasked by the Fourteenth Central 14th Finance Commission (FFC) to examine several aspects of the structure of devolution of powers, responsibilities and finances by states to rural local bodies (RLBs), based on the data provided by them to the FFC. Our study covered all decentralization models, namely, the panchayat system, the extension of the panchayat system to the 5th Scheduled Areas, Autonomous District Councils under the Sixth Schedule and other state specific arrangements.

While ascertaining the status of actual devolution of tasks and responsibilities relating to the basic civic functions of water supply, sanitation, solid waste management, drainage, roads, streetlights, community assets such as parks, burial and cremation grounds, and other means of communication such as waterways to rural local bodies, it was discovered that most states had legally endowed village level RLBs such as Gram Panchayats with regulatory and implementation powers to provide core public services. However, wide variations existed between states in the range of powers devolved upon intermediate and district level RLBs, with some states narrowing their ambit to merely undertake planning or providing advice.

The report analyzes the fiscal transfers from states to RLBs by studying the frameworks governing them, and assesses the strength of the systems of public financial accountability applicable to RLBs. It particularly looks at whether states subsumed earlier Central Finance Commission grants into their own state level transfers or treated these as additional grants; an important input for the FFC.

Trends, performance and efficiency of all RLB revenue sources (Tax and non-tax revenues, and transfers from State and Central governments) were analyzed by looking at the financial flow data provided by states. Trends of expenditure incurred by RLBs on core functions-were covered in detail in the study of their finances.

The study was hampered by inconsistent and incomplete data received from states, in spite of follow ups alongside the FFC staff. Though the researchers attempted to check the data for consistency and normalize it, in the case of some states, regular procedures could not be followed and the data considered the most consistent was studied.

The report estimates the gap in resources for delivering core services by RLBs for 2015-2020, using benchmarks set by the state and the union Government. It ends with AI’s suggestions on strategy options, including tax and non-tax measures, for bridging the gap between core function expenditure needs and available revenues. The suggestions include that a greater proportion of central grants and shares of buoyant state and central revenues ought to be provided to RLBs, so that they can close the fiscal gap and provide local core services that meet benchmarked standards. Concurrently, local revenue collection must be incentivized. In particular, property taxes remain largely untapped by RLBs.

​AI’s report was a critical input that was relied upon by the FFC to recommend increasing the amounts allocated to local governments from the divisible pool of taxes from Rs. 86161 crore to Rs. 287436 crore, an increase of 234 percent over the grants recommended by the 13th FC. This amounts to a 344 percent increase in the allocation of basic grants, from Rs. 56335 crore to Rs. 249978 crore. In the case of performance grants, which, as a proportion of the total grants has been brought down to 10 percent and 20 percent in the case of rural local governments and urban local governments respectively, the increase is relatively modest; from Rs. 29826 crore to Rs. 37458 crore. All in all, this amounts to an increase in the FFC grant to local governments, from 2.28 percent to 4 percent of the central divisible pool of taxes.

This is big money, translating at the Gram Panchayat level for instance, to an increase from Rs. 5 lakhs to Rs. 25 lakhs per year, depending upon the size of the Panchayat concerned.