Archives: Journal Articles

THE 2019 Lok Sabha election was fought against the backdrop of a sustained period of farmers’ protests across major Indian cities and regions, reflecting the intensification of agrarian distress over the past five years. Some of the key drivers, notably the collapse in agricultural commodity prices and incomes as a result of both an unfavourable global trading environment and misguided government policies, have been analysed in Seminar’s annual symposiums in the two years preceding this one.1 Nonetheless, against all the unrest, the BJP brought in a bumper electoral harvest in May 2019, while continuing to confront an agricultural sector estimated to be growing at just around 2% with farm incomes thought to be growing at the slowest pace recorded over the last fifteen years.2

For a government that has given itself the goal of ‘doubling farmers’ incomes’ by 2022, these are hard figures to digest. In response, there appears to have been a redoubling of faith in the flagship reform for this sector: the creation of an electronic National Agricultural Market or eNAM. Launched by Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in April 2016 eNAM, like the GST, expresses the ambition of forging ‘One Nation, One Market.’ However, as with the GST, the devil is always in the detail, and it is in its design and implementation that grand visions meet ground realities. It is here that eNAM needs some serious conceptual and empirical reality testing.

The unexpected increase in the number of census towns in the last census has thrust them into the spotlight. The new CTs account for almost 30% of the urban growth in the last decade. The estimated contribution of migration is similar to that in previous intercensal periods. Further, the data indicates a dispersed pattern of in situ urbanisation, with the reluctance of state policy to recognise new statutory towns partly responsible for the growth of new CTs. A growing share of India’s urban population, living in these CTs, is being governed under the rural administrative framework, despite very different demographic and economic characteristics, which may affect their future growth.

We visited 1519 villages across 19 Indian states in 2009 to (a) count all health care providers and (b) elicit their quality as measured through tests of medical knowledge. We document three main findings. First, 75% of villages have at least one health care provider and 64% of care is sought in villages with 3 or more providers. Most providers are in the private sector (86%) and, within the private sector, the majority are ‘informal providers’ without any formal medical training. Our estimates suggest that such informal providers account for 68% of the total provider population in rural India. Second, there is considerable variation in quality across states and formal qualifications are a poor predictor of quality. For instance, the medical knowledge of informal providers in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka is higher than that of fully trained doctors in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Surprisingly, the share of informal providers does not decline with socioeconomic status. Instead, their quality, along with the quality of doctors in the private and public sector, increases sharply. Third, India is divided into two nations not just by quality of health care providers, but also by costs: Better performing states provide higher quality at lower per-visit costs, suggesting that they are on a different production possibility frontier. These patterns are consistent with significant variation across states in the availability and quality of medical education. Our results highlight the complex structure of health care markets, the large share of private informal providers, and the substantial variation in the quality and cost of care across and within markets in rural India. Measuring and accounting for this complexity is essential for health care policy in India.

A two-page summary of the study is available here.

President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will exit from the Paris Agreement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the agreement works. It also goes against long-agreed climate principles, and is blind to emergent clean energy trends. In practical terms, the US had activated a rollback of mitigation policies and contributions to climate finance prior to this announcement. Until there are changes in domestic US climate politics—of which there are positive signs—the US cannot be regarded a reliable partner for global climate cooperation.

The United States’ (US) political revolution or convulsion, depending on where one sits on the ideological spectrum, has produced ripple effects across the world. While the vast network of allied states in West Europe and East Asia have their own reasons in keeping the “American goliath” engaged in these areas, Eurasia’s rising powers confront a different challenge. The principal challenge for these states is one of adapting to a lighter American footprint while also responding with their own order-building ideas to prevent a destabilising power transition.

Let us explore what the three Eurasian powers—Russia, China, and India—were doing on the world stage, and the possible impact of Donald Trump’s ascent on their foreign policies. Before the November 2016 election in the US, each of these three countries had been pursuing different roles based on a common assumption that primacy and exceptionalism would remain the default image of American policymakers.

The central and state governments have failed to implement the provisions of the Fifth Schedule, both in letter and spirit, as envisaged in the Indian constitution. Instead, the indifferent and callous attitude of the various political dispensations has led to marginalisation of the rights and autonomy of the tribal communities residing in areas governed by the Fifth schedule.

Trends over the last 25 years suggest that nearly 80% of the social sector spending has come from state budgets. Taken together with other economic happenings in the country, the centre’s role in financing social welfare, including elementary education, is likely to decline further. Analysing broad trends in total and per student spending on elementary education across major states in two financial years, this comment indicates how the centre could best incentivise states to spend differently on elementary education.

The Telugu Ganga project in India supplies the Krishna river waters to meet drinking water needs of the Chennai city in the state of Tamil Nadu, a nonriparian state. This has happened through an unusual historic accord between the riparian states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. The instance is often celebrated as the finest example of interstate river water cooperation in the history of independent India. This paper presents an alternative and a more complete and critical appraisal of interstate cooperation in the Telugu Ganga project focusing on transboundary political interactions to offer the following findings. One, the case of Telugu Ganga project showcases how and why cooperation and conflict coexist in transboundary water sharing. The celebrated interstate cooperation has turned into a source of conflicts eventually and is connected to the current shape and the state of the Krishna river water dispute. Two, it reveals a nexus of water provisioning politics and mainstream party politics in its making, and its subsequent contentious history. This nexus is a challenge to inter-basin transfer across territorial boundaries—an important drought coping mechanism. This challenge defines the character of politics of cooperation and conflict resolution in federal democracies, such as India. Three, India’s interstate river water governance suffers from dormant policy space and absence of institutional models for interstate river cooperation. This makes it ill-equipped to address the adverse implications of politics or to channelize for progressive outcomes of cooperation. At a broader policy level, India has to reconsider its excessive reliance on dispute resolution, and shift its focus to enabling cooperation for a better governance of its interstate rivers.

Suggested citation: Chokkakula, S. Reg Environ Change (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-1348-0

Planning for India’s energy future requires addressing multiple and simultaneous economic, social and environmental challenges. While there has been conceptual progress towards harnessing their synergies, there are limited methodologies available for operationalising a multiple objective framework for development and climate policy. This paper proposes a “multi-criteria decision analysis” approach to this problem, using illustrative examples from the cooking and buildings sectors. An MCDA approach enables policy processes that are analytically rigorous, participative and transparent, which are required to address India’s complex energy and climate challenges.

Suggested citation: Khosla et al., (2015) : “Towards Methodologies for Multiple Objective-Based Energy and Climate Policy”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol L, No 49, pp 49-59

Research on climate change mitigation tends to focus on supply-side technology solutions. A better understanding of demand-side solutions is missing. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to identify demand-side climate solutions, investigate their mitigation potential, detail policy measures and assess their implications for well-being.

Suggested citation: Creutzig, F., Roy, J., Lamb, W., Azevedo, I., de Bruin, W., Dalkmann, H., Edelenbosch, O., Geels, F., Grubler, A., Hepburn, C., Hertwich, E., Khosla, R., Mattauch, L., Minx, J., Ramakrishnan, A., Rao, N., Steinberger, J., Tavoni, M., Ürge-Vorsatz D., & Weber, E., (2018): Towards demand-side solutions for mitigating climate change, Nature Climate Change, Vol 8, pp 268-271, doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0121-1