Archives: Journal Articles

IN the last year, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were a much discussed issue. Most of the discussion focused on two issues, viz. (a) the acquisition of land, rehabilitation, the consequences for farmers and agricultural output, and (b) the cost of the various tax benefits provided to developers of SEZs and the units to be located in them. While these are important issues, they address only the cost aspect of the equation. Taking another path, this paper tries to determine the expected benefits from SEZs and whether they are being achieved. For this, it relies not on aggregate data but on projections made by the developers of individual SEZs that form the basis of claims advanced by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. What does the data say about the promised land of SEZs, the exports, the nature of investment and employment, regional dispersion and governance?

THE BJP’s victory in 2014 was described as a black swan – a rare event that is unlikely to be ever repeated. To everyone’s surprise, the party returned to power with an even bigger mandate in 2019. The BJP’s success in improving upon its 2014 performance has indeed forced us to revisit our existing theories on how Indians vote. Thus, we need a paradigmatic shift to understand how electoral majorities are likely to be constructed in 21st century India.

Elementary education administrators at the block level primarily perceive themselves, or report themselves to be, disempowered cogs in a hierarchical administrative culture that renders them powerless. They refer to their own roles and offices as “post offices,” used simply for doing the bidding of higher authorities and ferrying messages between the top and bottom of the education chain. Using the case of education delivery, this paper attempts to probe an administrator’s perspective in resolving the implementation problem at the last mile and is based on detailed primary fieldwork in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh along with some quantitative surveys conducted in Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh. It endeavours to trace the “cognitive maps” of administrators by capturing how last mile public servants see themselves and their jobs, and how notions of job performance are internalised and interpreted within the administrative context of elementary education in India.

In this article, I develop a model of the politics of vishwas (trust/belief). This is a form of personal politics in which voters prefer to centralize political power in a strong leader, and trust the leader to make good decisions for the polity – in contrast to the standard models of democratic accountability and issue-based politics. I argue that two factors lead to the BJP using the politics of vishwas to dominate Indian politics. First, like much of the world, there is an increasingly strong axis of conflict between those who believe in a unitary (Hindu) national identity for India and those who view India in ‘multicultural’ terms. This obliges supporters of Hindu nationalism to support political centralization to stymie federalism, which would require negotiation across regional, linguistic, caste, and religious identities. Second, the BJP’s control of media and communication with the voter, in tandem with a strong party machinery, give the party structural advantages in mobilizing voters around the messages of Narendra Modi. I find that this change in Indian politics is reflected in voter turnout behavior in India.

India occupies an intriguing dual position in global climate politics—a poor and developing economy with low levels of historical and per capita emissions, and a large and rapidly growing economy with rising emissions. Indian climate politics has substantially been shaped around the first perspective, and increasingly, under international pressure, is being forced to grapple with the second. This review of Indian climate politics examines the initial crystallization of Indian climate positions and its roots in national climate politics, and then examines the modest ways in which climate politics have been revisited in domestic debates since about 2007. Following elucidation of these themes, the article turns to a discussion of new directions for Indian climate policy and their moorings in domestic climate politics.

Abstract: India occupies an intriguing dual position in global climate politics—a poor and developing economy with low levels of historical and per capita emissions, and a large and rapidly growing economy with rising emissions. Indian climate politics has substantially been shaped around the first perspective, and increasingly, under international pressure, is being forced to grapple with the second. This review of Indian climate politics examines the initial crystallization of Indian climate positions and its roots in national climate politics, and then examines the modest ways in which climate politics have been revisited in domestic debates since about 2007. Following elucidation of these themes, the article turns to a discussion of new directions for Indian climate policy and their moorings in domestic climate politics.

WIREs Climate Change 2013, 4:191–201. DOI: 10.1002/wcc.210

This article frames the political economy of electricity trade and hydropower development in eastern South Asia. It distils and analyzes four crucial variables in this regard: the health of distribution companies in India; the role of hydropower in India’s ambitious turn to renewable energy; Bangladesh’s power crisis and import dependency; and the governance of regional electricity trading arrangements. It argues that progress in both electricity trade and hydropower development in the region will be incremental in the next decade, hindered by mixed demand signals and the turbulence of geopolitics.

Indian coal power capacity has doubled in the last ten years, and its coal pipeline is the second largest on the globe. This paper analyzes the political economy determinants of India’s reliance on coal in the power sector. We base our analysis on a novel theoretical framework to assess how actors having different objectives shape coal investment decisions in India. Our results are based on the analysis of 28 semi-structured expert interviews conducted in Delhi. We find that India’s substantial expansion of coal power can be explained by the following factors. First, the power sector was liberalized to ensure sufficient supply. This resulted in large industry conglomerates investing in coal and securing long-term profits as renewable energy support was ineffective. Second, the planned public investments in new coal capacity are motivated by securing the long term availability of electricity. Third, the reliance on coal in Eastern India for jobs, and the presence of local vested interests, are major barriers to a transformation away from coal. Fourth, pollution regulations that would limit coal use are ineffective because of the strong political influence of coal-proponents.

India has built a regular school-based decentralised data collection system investing much time and resources. However, all the data has not helped in determining how far the country has progressed on the goal of “Education for All” given the varied and often contradictory evidence. The quality of the data collected is highly suspect, as different sources provide vastly different estimates and the processes of verification and validation, are not in use. It would appear then that despite the fact that the coverage and scope of data collection has increased enormously with many more indicators added, and technology has enabled better management of data, some nagging questions remain about the quality, utility and purpose of the data, with obvious implications for planning and policymaking.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests’ initiative to set up an independent environmental regulator is a positive one and acknowledges the problems in the current system of regulations. Yet, a perusal of the proposal suggests that it has a number of limitations and therefore has to be rejected. But it is equally important that viable alternatives to the proposed agency are actively constructed.

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XLVI no 38, 17 September 2011