Archives: Project

‘Roads’ is a five year ethnographic research project on infrastructure development in South Asia. The project, funded by the European Research Council, will provide the first ethnographic account of the culture of ‘road builders’, their knowledge practices, interrelations and motivations.

‘Roads’ is headed by Edward Simpson, Professor in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. Srinivas Chokkakula is studying the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), the Government of India’s flagship programme for building rural roads. Srinivas is conducting an institutional ethnography to understand the history of ideas and rationalities underlying the programme’s vision of “roads for inclusive rural development” in India.

In 2009 the Government of India directed all state governments and union territories to prepare State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCC), consistent with the strategy outlined in the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC). Twenty two states in India have since initiated the process of drafting SAPCCs, putting in motion a dynamic process involving tie-ups with multiple stakeholders, formation of new committees, cross sectoral deliberations, workshops, and significantly, the marriage of new research and plans with existing policy programmes.

Procedurally, it has been a sizable effort at mapping regional climate vulnerability, examining future projections, arriving at sectoral implications, and framing actionable strategies. Environmental policy-making on such a grand scale however, is little studied and understood.

The Scaling City Institutions for India initiative at the Centre for Policy Research has launched Policy Labs, a dialogue series to showcase global case studies, facilitate cross country exchanges and foster partnership and collaboration amongst various sector partner organisations. It aims to build a stronger evidence base for developing policies, programmes and implementation of plans for achieving safe and sustainable cities and foster a community of practice.

Settlements in India are grouped into three broad categories, namely villages, statutory towns (STs) and census towns (CTs), the latter two being the two main types of urban areas in India. CTs are administratively rural settlements which nevertheless satisfy the criteria of urban areas. This project will investigate the nature, history, as well as economic and political structures of Census Towns.

Census Towns raise a number of questions regarding their characteristics and classification which the project seeks to address: In what respects is a Census Town different from a village or a statutory town? Why is one settlement rural and another one urban? What are the trade-offs between the rural and urban status and the associated government structures? In order to consider these issues, the study analyses national survey data, such as the Indian Census data, along with in-depth field studies in Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal, which will include surveys and interviews.

The data will help shed light on the governance and economic structures of Census Towns. The project will analyse the variation in the structures of governance and public services and seeks to get a deeper understanding of the role of the government in driving spatial and social changes. Questions regarding the economic activities and the economic growth, employment, and land use patterns will also be addressed. This will help get a deeper understanding of the factors driving the expansion of settlement and the economic interactions with other settlements and cities.

India’s climate change plan is rooted in promoting sustainable development, with climate actions as co-benefits. Operationalizing such an approach requires integrating multiple, often simultaneous, objectives: growth; energy access; socio-environmental benefits; and energy security. We propose Multi Criteria Decision Analysis as a framework to meet India’s goals in a coherent, deliberative and transparent manner. CPR seeks to initiate and inform discussions on multiple-objective based energy and climate policy, and promote its implementation. We are also testing its application starting with a rural cooking study, and developing a network of interested researchers and a repository of relevant resources.

The project aims to understand the rationale and approaches of the existing legal, policy and institutional frameworks for the realization of the right to sanitation at the regional, national and local levels, and to identify best practices as well as implementation challenges and gaps. The research team will examine these issues through fieldwork in three states – Kerala, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. The analysis will also include an examination of the right to sanitation in the context of its link with other human rights such as the right to water, the right to education and the right to health as well as the potential of using the ongoing programmes and schemes introduced by the Central and state governments, such as programs for ensuring rural employment and housing for the realization of the right to sanitation. In order to contribute to the mutual learning process, the project will also assess the national legal and policy frameworks for the realization of the right to sanitation in Kenya and South Africa, where it is a constitutionally guaranteed right.

The Rental Housing Lab Series has been jointly organised by the Centre for Policy Research, GIZ, Cities Alliance, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Habitat for Humanity International, HUDCO’s HSMI and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The Labs have been curated as a platform to deepen the rental housing policy dialogue; restructure, influence and operationalise the policy, legislation and regulation at the national and state levels. The Labs intend to examine the market mechanisms and enabling ecosystem needed to deliver private, formal or informal housing to the poor and migrant workers in cities. The Labs seek to provide a platform for discussing the experiences of the governments, researchers, academicians and practitioners on inclusive and affordable urban housing strategies.

The Public Accountability and Governance in Education (PAGE) initiative seeks to broaden the discourse on public education by bringing together empirical research and field interventions in the area of education governance. It is aimed at informing the academic and policy space on issues that affect the delivery of elementary education and the Right to Education in particular. Through this project an attempt is also made to bridge the gap between field realities and policy formulation. We thus work closely with a range of civil society groups on the ground as well as state structures at all levels of government.

The work of PAGE includes a) developing systems of transparency, accountability and community monitoring in education; b) conducting empirical research that can inform policy on systems of delivery; c) creating systems of local data collection and linking with the official data-base; and d) bringing together academics, practitioners and policy makers on a common platform to engage in a series of dialogues and deliberations on emerging issues in education policy.

Our current research includes i) a 5 state-study on Monitoring Government Schools; ii) an in-depth study on estimating out-of-school children in a single Panchayat, and iii) a documentation of community monitoring of schools.

India’s electricity sector has been an Achilles’ heel for the emerging economy. Despite 25 years of techno-economic interventions, persistent sector inefficiencies not only continue to be a drain on the state exchequer, but also compromise the quality of this essential service for citizens and businesses. While grappling with the legacy challenges, the sector is undergoing a fundamental transition, in the ways which electricity is produced, supplied and consumed. The impetus comes from the global trend on decarbonisation of electricity as well as a strong domestic push for addressing chronic electricity challenges and pursue an electricity future that ensures uninterrupted supply for all, increasingly from non-fossil sources. Renewable energy technologies, the key driver of change, offer the promise of low-cost power with additional co-benefits like environmental gain and industrial competitiveness. But low cost, by itself, does not guarantee that this transition will happen in presence of substantial interests and institutions built around the existing conventional energy technologies. The transition will be shaped by the political and economic context under which the sector operates, along with the techno-economic options.

While the policy discourse is focused on techno-economic options to enable this transition, there is little attention to the underlying political economic context, lock-ins to conventional energy technologies, and the disruptive potential of new technologies. Our past research – Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States ­– suggests that electricity sector dynamics cannot be understood independent of broader political economy trends. To examine electricity politics, it is important to understand the extent to which reforms are informed by and address the political context. With this backdrop, we aim to promote more wide-spread engagement with the need for political analysis and understanding of the electricity sector as an important complement to techno-economic analysis, and thereby, contribute to an enabling policy and regulatory framework for transition to a clean, inclusive and viable electricity future.

Building on in-depth analysis and sustained partnership at the national and state level, this project aims to demonstrate the importance of a political economy focus in bringing about improvements in electricity sector outcomes and a clean energy transition, and provide concrete recommendations on reforms that take into account political context. In particular, it will:

Stimulate engagement with political opportunities and constraints as part of national electricity policy discussion.
Promote development of state-specific approaches to electricity transition – in Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh – that internalise the effects of political changes, important complement to techno-economic analysis.
Provide analysis and stimulate discussion toward solving the free power to farmer conundrum, drawing on multiple case studies in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.
The project, spread over three years (August 2019 – July 2021), is supported by Children’s Investment Fund Foundations and has additional support from Oak Foundation’s core grant to the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment.

This project is supported by the Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung (RLS), a German political foundation that is part of the grassroots movement of democratic socialism. Bearing the name of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), the foundation serves as a forum for debate and critical thinking about political alternatives, as well as a research centre for progressive social development. The aim of the partnership is to undertake expansive research and stir greater conversation around understudied facets of India’s polity, including on questions of substantive representation, activism and issues in Indian politics. The partnership, since 2019, was rewarding and allowed us to deeply understand the changing dynamics of democratic processes and institutions within the country. Along with research, many academic events were held in partnership with RLS over the years, which opened up the space for future research and dialogue.