Archives: Journal Articles

Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) interact directly with users and play a key role in providing services. In the Global South, and specifically in India, the work practices of frontline public workers—technical staff, field engineers, desk officers, and social workers—reflect their understanding of urban water reforms. The introduction of technology-driven solutions and new public management instruments, such as benchmarking, e-governance, and evaluation procedures, has transformed the nature of frontline staff’s responsibilities but has not solved the structural constraints they face. In regard to implementing solutions to improve access in poor neighborhoods, SLBs continue to play a key role in the making of formal and informal provision. Their daily practices are ambivalent. They can be both predatory and benevolent, which explains the contingent impacts on service improvement and the difficulty in generalizing reform experiments. Nevertheless, the discretionary power of SLBs can be a source of flexibility and adaptation to complex social settings.

The Constitution of India envisages three types of emergencies: A national emergency; a state emergency (in the federal setup, regions are called states in India, and the central government has the power to impose an emergency if there is a breakdown of law and order in that state); and a financial emergency. The problem the State faces is how it can respond effectively to exceptional situations without casting its adherence to the rule of law into question.” Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde offers a set of solutions within a model structure anchored in constitutional laws. The model structure, which applies at the federal level, advocates a separation between the authorizing agency—the political wing—and the implementation agency, as well as creating a distinction between a “law” and a “measure,” and between a most extreme and a merely difficult situation. By focusing on the actions of the higher judiciary in India, this Article tests whether the safeguards in Böckenförde’s model structure function at the sub-national state level in a very different geography and context. The results highlight the concern that the dynamics of democracy and the reality of how political power is garnered in a federal Westminster style framework effectively stymie the procedural innovations introduced by Böckenförde’s model by creating conditions, not for fair play, but for subverting the spirit of the law. Even the procedures outlined by Böckenförde—such as an emphasis on making the agent who holds the emergency powers a political, and not merely an administrative organization—accentuates, rather than mitigates, this problem.

Background: Dengue is a major international public health concern, one of the most important arthropod-borne diseases. More than 3.5 billion people are at risk of dengue infection and there are an estimated 390 million dengue infections annually. This prolific increase has been connected to societal changes such as population growth and increasing urbanization generating intense agglomeration leading to proliferation of synanthropic mosquito species. Quantifying the spatio-temporal epidemiology of dengue in large cities within the context of a Geographic Information System is a first step in the identification of socio-economic risk factors.

Methodology/Principal Findings: This Project has been approved by the ethical committee of Institut Pasteur. Data has been anonymized and de-identified prior to geolocalisation and analysis. A GIS was developed for Delhi, enabling typological characterization of the urban environment. Dengue cases identified in the Delhi surveillance system from 2008 to 2010 were collated, localised and embedded within this GIS. The spatio-temporal distribution of dengue cases and extent of clustering were analyzed. Increasing distance from the forest in Delhi reduced the risk of occurrence of a dengue case. Proximity to a hospital did not increase risk of a notified dengue case. Overall, there was high heterogeneity in incidence rate within areas with the same socio-economical profiles and substantial inter-annual variability. Dengue affected the poorest areas with high density of humans, but rich areas were also found to be infected, potentially because of their central location with respect to the daily mobility network of Delhi. Dengue cases were highly clustered in space and there was a strong relationship between the time of introduction of the virus and subsequent cluster size. At a larger scale, earlier introduction predicted the total number of cases.

Conclusions/Significance: DENV epidemiology within Delhi has a forest fire signature. The stochastic nature of this invasion process likely smothers any detectable socio-economic risk factors. However, the significant finding that the size of the dengue case cluster depends on the timing of its emergence emphasizes the need for early case detection and implementation of effective mosquito control. A better understanding of the role of population mobility in contributing to dengue risk could also help focus control on areas at particular risk of dengue virus importation.

This paper traces the evolution of Indian policy on the boundary dispute with China during the years 1948-60. It re-examines the revisionist claim that the dispute took hold mainly because Nehru had ruled out any compromise with the Chinese. The paper contends that such an interpretation does not adequately capture the nuances of the Indian approach. In particular, perceptions of China’s territorial ambitions and India’s relative weakness are critical to understanding India’s stance on the dispute.

Independent regulatory agencies have become an important part of the governance landscape in India and elsewhere. Some regulators have achieved useful outcomes. However, the creation of independent sectoral regulators in India has not been accompanied by critical reflection on their role, or attention to the political, legal, and institutional contexts within which they operate. This study explores various theoretical perspectives on the political economy of regulation, and elaborates on the implications these have for electricity and water regulation in India. The paper focuses on three themes: why governments create independent regulators, the meaning of “regulatory governance” and how it can be improved, and how regulators can address concerns such as social issues embedded in economic decision-making.

The social coalition that supported the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 mirrored the demographic profile of the Hindu society. The party made substantial gains among the lower castes, the poor, rural voters, and less educated. How did BJP manage to attract these new voters? We argue that the immediate context of 2019 elections along with a profound ideological shift in Indian politics lies at the heart of the BJP’s success. Underpinning the short-term factors of Modi’s popularity, BJP’s organizational advantage, heightened nationalistic sentiments, and expansive welfare politics, a new form of ethno-political majoritarianism delinked from religious Hindu nationalism was key to the party’s ability to attract new voters.

India is one of the first jurisdictions to have embraced an environmental right, and ‘fostered an extensive and innovative jurisprudence’ on it. The Indian Supreme Court has held the principles of precaution, polluter pays and inter-generational equity as well as the public trust doctrine as integral to the corpus of Indian law. There is, however, many a slip between the cup and the lip, and this article explores some of these slips in detail. It argues that the constitutionally guaranteed environmental right is poorly defined, and therefore offers little guidance in making difficult judgments central to an exercise of this right. After an analysis of relevant case law, it finds that at least some of the principles intended to guide the actualization of the environmental right do little more than create a smokescreen, which renders application and implementation difficult, and obfuscates the hard questions. It also argues that the judicial discretion available to judges in public interest environmental litigation, in combination with the proliferation of imprecise rights, allows the judiciary’s preferences for certain rights and certain modes of argumentation to prevail. It concludes however that, notwithstanding these concerns, the Indian Supreme Court deserves credit for having delivered a vast number of environmentally sensitive decisions, and for its willingness to embrace innovative and progressive conceptual tools in the service of environmental protection.

The rise of the BJP in national and state politics is often associated with a representation skewed toward traditional elite groups and the marginalisation of groups associated with other parties, such as minorities and various dominant OBC groups. This article examines the transformation of the sociological composition of the Lok Sabha over time and seeks to assess its elitist character, by providing descriptive statistics on five socio-demographic and economic variables: caste, religion, gender, dynasticism, wealth and occupation. Data suggests that political representation in India has by and large always been skewed toward the elites, but the composition of these elites has changed over time. For instance, the recent surge in the representation of the upper caste in the Lok Sabha pre-dates the rise of the BJP in 2014, and the marginalisation of minorities and women is a long-standing phenomenon. Since 2014 however, the BJP has contributed to enhancing a particular form of elite – those rooted in local and regional business networks.

This paper documents the quality of medical advice in low-income countries. Our evidence on health care quality in low-income countries is drawn primarily from studies in four countries: Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Paraguay. We provide an overview of recent work that uses two broad approaches: medical vignettes (in which medical providers are presented with hypothetical cases and their responses are compared to a checklist of essential procedures) and direct observation of the doctor-patient interaction These two approaches have proved quite informative. For example, doctors in Tanzania complete less than a quarter of the essential checklist for patients with classic symptoms of malaria, a disease that kills 63,000-96,000 Tanzanians each year. A public-sector doctor in India asks one (and only one) question in the average interaction: “What’s wrong with you?” We present systematic evidence in this paper to show that these isolated facts represent common patterns. We find that the quality of care in low-income countries as measured by what doctors know is very low, and that the problem of low competence is compounded due to low effort — doctors provide lower standards of care for their patients than they know how to provide. We discuss how the properties and correlates of measures based on vignettes and observation may be used to evaluate policy changes. Finally, we outline the agenda in terms of further research and measurement.