Archives: Journal Articles

India is a significant player in climate policy and politics. It has been vocal in international climate negotiations, but its role in these negotiations has changed over time. In an interactive relationship between domestic policy and international positions, India has increasingly become a testing ground for policies that internalize climate considerations into development. This article critically reviews the arc of climate policy and politics in India over time. It begins by examining changes in knowledge and ideas around climate change in India, particularly in the areas of ethics, climate impacts, India’s energy transition, linkages with sustainability, and sequestration. The next section examines changes in politics, policy, and governance at both international and national scales. The article argues that shifts in ideas and knowledge of impacts, costs, and benefits of climate action and shifts in the global context are reflected and refracted through discourses in India’s domestic and international policies.

Last year witnessed a nadir in India–China relations as the two neighbours stumbled into their most serious border crisis in decades. While both leaderships were sensible enough to pull back from the brink, 2018 has seen steps from Delhi and Beijing to turn the page on their deteriorating relationship. As I have previously suggested in this column, the Doklam crisis showed the limits of confrontation in an age of interdependence (Z D Singh 2017).

In the compromise road map for future climate change negotiations that was drawn up at Bali, the urgency suggested by science was lost. There are yet positives in that the US remains in the negotiating process and the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” of the developing countries has been maintained. India needs to now ask itself if it should hold on to a defensive national stance on climate or if the time is right to develop and implement creative national policies, and then articulate an international negotiating position around these policies.

Despite decades of rhetoric about improving health and two decades of economic growth, vaccination rates in India remain low. As in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, and Afghanistan, measles vaccination rates in India are around 70%, and only 44% of children aged 1-2 years are fully immunised.1 Low vaccination rates have been alternately blamed on insufficient public funds, poor implementation of vaccination programmes, and a general apathy towards the health of the poor. Yet, we have remarkably little evidence to help us separate problems with implementation of vaccination programmes from design flaws that restrict take-up.

Electricity for cooling improves health and quality of life and is an important mode of adapting to extreme weather conditions and to climate change. This study measures the change in electricity demand in response to weather shocks at the household level in Delhi, and at various aggregate levels in India. Our econometric analysis uses a semi-parametric model to capture the nonlinearity of short-run temperature response. On average, aggregate electricity demand in India increases by 11% or more at temperatures above 30 °C from demand at temperatures of 21–24 °C, with substantial heterogeneity across states. Aggregate demand in Delhi increases by 30% or more at temperatures above 30 °C. Using rich micro-data on electricity demand in Delhi, we do a first-of-its-kind estimation of household-level temperature response. We find evidence that low-income consumers, especially those living in slums, show limited incremental response to high temperatures, likely due to an absence of cooling options. These findings underscore the need to improve our understanding of the constraints posed by poverty on climate change adaptation, and for interventions to mitigate risks of heat stress among the poor. This also suggests rising affluence will lead to sharp increases in electricity demand for cooling.

Despite widespread and substantial household expenditure on private tutoring in many developing countries, not much is known about their effects on learning outcomes. The main challenge in estimating such an effect is that the decision to send the child for private tutoring is endogenous. This paper utilises a large household survey conducted in rural India, and employs fixed effect estimation to control for the effect of unobserved variables. It finds a positive and significant effect of private tutoring on learning outcomes for students in Classes 1 to 8. The effect is stronger for disadvantaged students–those who are less wealthy, and those whose parents are relatively less educated. This research has been funded by Accountability Initiative (New Delhi) and was carried out when both authors were with Accountability Initiative. The authors thank the referee whose comments helped improve the original draft. The authors would also like to thank Yamini Aiyar, Rukmini Banerjee and Wilima Wadhwa for their support and simulating discussions.

Human rights and intellectual property protection are two distinct fields that have largely evolved separately. Their relationship needs to be re-examined for a number of reasons. First, the impacts of intellectual property rights on the realization of human rights such as the right to health have become much more visible following the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement. Second, the increasing importance of intellectual property rights has led to the need for clarifying the scope of human rights provisions protecting individual contributions to knowledge. Third, a number of new challenges need to be addressed concerning contributions to knowledge, which cannot effectively be protected under existing intellectual property rights regimes. This article examines the different aspects of the relationship between intellectual property rights, human rights, and science and technology related provisions in human rights treaties. It analyzes existing knowledge protection-related provisions in human rights treaties. It also examines some of the impacts of existing intellectual property rights regimes on the realization of human rights. Further, it analyzes the recently adopted General Comment 17 on Article 15(1)c of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and proposes an alternative broader reading of this provision focusing on traditional knowledge.

In this article, I describe the IMF and the World Bank’s coercive use of the conditionality arrangement in determining the fiscal and monetary policies, and shaping the development decisions of debtor countries as constituting not an expansion but, in fact, a transfer of “public decision making” power from debtor states to these non-state actors. I argue that the exercise of such public decision making power by these institutions has a significant coercive impact on the lives of the people within developing countries. When such coercion results in severe deprivation of basic human rights, the need for accountability of such institutions to the people becomes imperative. I examine the prevalence of horizontal application of rights in liberal democratic constitutional orders and argue for its extension to the international level in order to curb the state-like power of non-state actors such as the World Bank and the IMF.

My argument involves five steps. First, I describe the evolving role of the IMF and the World Bank from institutions entrusted with the role of “monetary cooperation” and “assisting/facilitating ‘development’”, respectively, to institutions engaging substantively in the “development process” as ‘global policy makers’ for the debtor states. I argue that the changing role of these institutions and the criticisms made against them with respect to the exercise of their roles provides the basis for the demand for human rights accountability of these two institutions.

Second, I examine existing institutional accountability mechanisms for the World Bank and the IMF. I discuss both self regulatory measures and quasi independent accountability mechanisms set up by these institutions, for instance, the World Bank Inspection Panel and the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office. I demonstrate the inadequacies of these accountability mechanisms to justify the need for non-institutional mechanisms of accountability.

Third, I examine non-institutional mechanisms of accountability at the municipal and international levels. Based on this analysis, I argue in favour of international human rights accountability of these institutions and describe the attempts that have been made so far to develop such a theory of accountability. The incompleteness of the existing theory of international accountability leads me to look to the horizontality thesis to articulate a comprehensive theory of international human rights accountability.

Fourth, I make a normative argument in favour of the application of international human rights law to non-state actors like the World Bank and the IMF based on the doctrine of horizontal application of rights in constitutional law. I justify the need for transplanting a constitutional rights doctrine of accountability to international human rights law by means of an argument about the ‘nature’ of rights as protection against power. I demonstrate the prevalence and growing popularity of the horizontality doctrine via a comparative constitutional law analysis of this doctrine in various constitutional systems, including Ireland, India, South Africa, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, thereby concluding that horizontal application of rights is an accepted doctrine of comparative constitutional law.

Finally, I argue for the normative extension of horizontal application of rights on the international plane to ensure that international human rights law binds the World Bank and the IMF in their activities and operations. I give some preliminary ideas about how rights would be horizontally applied to constrain the actions of the World Bank and the IMF. I conclude by raising certain questions that must be addressed in order to make this model of accountability more meaningful. These questions investigate the possible fora where these rights might be enforced and explore the possibility of extending this doctrine to other intergovernmental organisations and non-state actors.

Standardized patients (SPs), i.e. mystery shoppers for healthcare providers, are increasingly used as a tool to measure quality of clinical care, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where medical record abstraction is unlikely to be feasible. The SP method allows care to be observed without the provider’s knowledge, removing concerns about the Hawthorne effect, and means that providers can be directly compared against each other. However, their undercover nature means that there are methodological and ethical challenges beyond those found in normal fieldwork. We draw on a systematic review and our own experience of implementing such studies to discuss six key steps in designing and executing SP studies in healthcare facilities, which are more complex than those in retail settings. Researchers must carefully choose the symptoms or conditions the SPs will present in order to minimize potential harm to fieldworkers, reduce the risk of detection and ensure that there is a meaningful measure of clinical care. They must carefully define the types of outcomes to be documented, develop the study scripts and questionnaires, and adopt an appropriate sampling strategy. Particular attention is required to ethical considerations and to assessing detection by providers. Such studies require thorough planning, piloting and training, and a dedicated and engaged field team. With sufficient effort, SP studies can provide uniquely rich data, giving insights into how care is provided which is of great value to both researchers and policymakers.

In recent years, we have seen positive developments in policy, funding and outcomes on child nutrition in India. Now, when the Covid-19 pandemic has placed a significant strain on our already vulnerable populations, it is time is institute a far more decentralised, agile and equitable nutrition financing architecture.