Policy Briefs & Reports

Commons, or Common Property Resources refers to private property for a group, rather than an individual. They have been used by communities for various purposes since time immemorial. However, as a result of encroachments by private parties and the regularisation of the same by State Governments,...

Rural areas in India are experiencing significant gains in toilet coverage under the public funded programmes. Given the rate of ‘in-situ urbanization’ in a growing urban paradigm,the rural areas, in many parts, seems to emulate urban infrastructural preferences for their toilets. This may remain...

The newly elected federal Government of India (GoI) launched the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in 2015 with the stated purpose of improving the governance and infrastructural deficiencies that plague Indian cities. The Mission categorically states that there is no one definition of a 'smart city' an...

This report is the culmination of a study conducted by the Accountability Initiative (AI) on Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin in 2017 on the request of the Udaipur district administration. The study understands the outcomes, and the processes, which led to Open Defecation Free status in selected Gram...

This report, jointly put out by the Centre for Policy Research and JustJobs Network, draws attention to geographies in India and Indonesia that are acting as migration junctions because they simultaneously experience high levels of in- and out-migration. The quantitative analysis is based on an e...

Indian cities routinely make decisions on land use, housing, water, transport, economic growth and waste management that have implications for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Aligning these sectoral actions with climate goals involves understanding how infrastructural systems interact a...

The CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program, with support from Duleep Matthai Nature Conservation Trust has prepared handouts on the legal mechanisms available in Human wildlife conflict in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha and Karnataka. These handouts entail: A brief overview of the present s...

In India, there is great concern over the retail tariffs being charged for electricity, but ironically little attention is paid to the components of overall costs. Power generation makes up 70-80% of the cost of supplying electricity, and power procurement practices have a significant effect on t...

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 sc...

Land transformation has been at the centre of economic growth of post-colonial, Asian nation-states. While their political reforms and economic policies have focused on land governance, the outcomes have resulted in promoting privatisation and speculative business interest in ecologically sensiti...

Land transformation has been at the centre of economic growth of post-colonial, Asian nation-states. While their political reforms and economic policies have focused on land governance, the outcomes have resulted in promoting privatisation and speculative business interest in ecologically sensiti...

Land transformation has been at the centre of economic growth of post-colonial, Asian nation-states. While their political reforms and economic policies have focused on land governance, the outcomes have resulted in promoting privatisation and speculative business interest in ecologically sensiti...

The Paris Agreement establishes a new multilateral architecture guiding countries’ climate change efforts under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Parties are currently negotiating more detailed rules and procedures for implementing the agreement, including provisions addre...

More than two decades after the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996 and the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Cess Act, 1996 came into force, the efficacy of this framework remains in question. Correctional steps hav...

Across the globe, the “development experience” of communities varies depending on their socioeconomic and political backgrounds. As a result of advancing developmental projects, a few communities are invariably made to pay a disproportionate share of the environmental costs in the form of exposur...

Across the world, poor communities bear a disproportionate burden of the environmental cost of development. Harmful projects such as polluting industrial units, municipal disposal sites or mining projects are usually situated close to poor neighbourhoods. These communities grapple on a daily basi...

India is poised at the edge of an energy transformation. This shift is shaped in large part by the country’s ongoing economic, social, and technological transitions. Indian cities will host an influx of 200 million more people by 2030. Most of these people will come from a low base of developmen...