Policy Briefs & Reports

India’s approach to climate policy is based on amplifying synergies between sustainable development and climate outcomes, or co-benefits. However, the evidence base for the magnitude of these synergies remains limited. This brief summarizes the result of global models, which provide strong eviden...

Bangladesh as a neihboring country holds crucial geostrategic and economic significance for India. It also serves well with India’s model of ‘South-South’ development cooperation and provides ample support to India’s ‘Act East Policy’. Importantly, stronger ties with Bangladesh helps India to pro...

Creating a framework of religion-state relations that would mollify tensions between religions, within religions, and between believers and non-believers, has been the bane of many a constitution-framer’s existence. And when issues pertaining to the ambit of religious freedom show up in the docke...

A central issue in the ongoing negotiations towards a new international climate change agreement this year in Paris is how the agreement will differentiate obligations among developed and developing countries. Differentiation among parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Cha...

In fashioning the new international climate change agreement to be adopted later this year in Paris, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) must address a range of legal issues. This brief outlines some of the key issues and concludes that: The Paris outcome...

India is one of the few countries that has been estimated to have a “critical” shortage of health workers and therefore unlikely to be able to provide essential health interventions to its people (WHO 2006). The dire impacts of these shortages are evident from the fact that it has fallen short of...

India’s exports have declined for six consecutive monthssince December 2014 with an average decline of 13.85% yoy. The decline was broad-based. Even exports of Manufactured goods trended lower during this time and failed to compensate for the fall in nominal value of commodity exports, which decl...

In 2013-14, Accountability Initiative(AI) was tasked by the Fourteenth Central 14th Finance Commission (FFC) to examine several aspects of the structure of devolution of powers, responsibilities and finances by states to rural local bodies (RLBs), based on the data provided by them to the FFC. Ou...

Policy and planning documents define eight types of settlement in Delhi, only one of which is termed “planned”. The other seven types of settlement become, by opposition, ‘unplanned’. This ‘unplanned’ city houses the vast majority of Delhi’s residents across the economic spectrum: these settlemen...

The Central Statistics Office (CSO), the custodian of Indian statistics, has faced a lot of questioning after the release of the new GDP series with 2011-12 as base. The RBI, Ministry of Finance, IMF, several credit rating agencies have all questioned the validity of the revisions. Some analysts ...

What should India put forward as the mitigation component of its climate contribution (or ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contribution’ (INDC))? Since energy accounts for 77% of India’s greenhouse gas emissions, this question can only be answered as one part of a larger discussion about India’s e...

Delhi’s jhuggi jhopri clusters (JJCs), resettlement colonies, and unauthorised colonies are largely without piped water supply. In its absence, residents of these and other informal settlements—estimated to house threequarters of Delhi’s residents1 —have come to rely on a patchwork of alternative...

“A key macro-economic variable critical to competitiveness and prospects for export growth is the exchange rate…..If the nominal exchange rate stays steady and the rate of inflation in India is higher than that in the rest of the world (as has been the case for the last decade) the real exchange ...

Many of the challenges and complexities of governance in Delhi arise from its place at the intersection of local, state, and national jurisdictions. This brief explains Delhi’s governance structure at the local, state, and union levels of government.

Segregation in access to education in India had been escalating since the 1970s when a large number of private schools capitalized on the opportunity to provide separate schools for the middle class. This initial segregation was further perpetuated with a boom in the availability of low-fee priva...

The unauthorised colony is one of seven types of unplanned settlements in Delhi, built on land which is either not zoned for residential use by the Master Plan or which has not yet been included in the development area. These colonies are most often situated on land zoned for agricultural use tha...

Between FY 2006-07 and FY 2010- 11, allocations for the Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR) more than doubled from 2,000 crore to 5,171 crore. In FY 2015-16, GOI discontinued key schemes run by the Ministry. Consequently, allocations have fallen to 95 crore. BRGF has been discontinued in FY 2015-1...

In FY 2015-16, 34,699 crore was allocated to MGNREGS, accounting for 47% of the total MoRD budget. An additional 5,000 crore has been committed in 2015-16, based on resource availability. The timing of fund releases has slowed down considerably in FY 2014-15. In FY 2013-14, 60% of the funds we...