Archives: Project

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.

The JNNURM is a federal investment program in cities, launched in 2005. The study reviews and analyses the program’s rationale and performance.

On the one hand, the project uses a wide range of secondary sources to analyse the historical background of the JNNURM, tracing the evolution of public policy in India on urban growth. This will help provide a deeper understanding of the complex urban issues and answer the question as to whether the JNNURM is a project response or a policy response to these problems.

On the other hand, the study focuses on evaluating the JNNURM by investigating, inter alia, its rationale, its funding patterns, incentive structures, utilisation of funds and the difficulties in the interplay between the different urban governance institutions. The aim is to inspire more effective and equitable future policies to cope with the problems faced by Indian cities.

For the purpose of the study, two publicly accessible databases, one project based and the other reform based, have been prepared. The database on projects covers both submissions of JNNURM i.e. Urban Infrastructure and Governance (UIG) and Basic Services to Urban Poor (BSUP). The database on Reforms refers to the analysis of various reform progress reports at State and Urban Local Bodies Levels.

Even after seventy years of becoming a republic, land remains the most important economic, social, and cultural resource for the vast majority of Indians. Land provides a measure of security, often not experienced with other economic resources like labour and capital. Unsurprisingly then, on ground conflict over land is the most pervasive and intractable of all conflicts in India, and legal disputes over land are the most important factor responsible for clogging cases in courts, both in terms of number and pendency of such cases. Such legal and extra-legal conflict over land not only threatens India’s economic development, but also its social and political stability. Conflicting laws cause legal disputes. Yet, the number and extent of land laws in India is anyone’s guess, because there is no existing publicly available comprehensive database of land laws in India. The “Mapping Indian Land Laws” project is an attempt to fill this gap.

The MILL project consists of an interactive exploratory archive of over one thousand colonial and post-colonial central and state laws for a geographically representative sample of eight states, namely, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Punjab, and Telangana. From land reforms to land acquisition, forest laws to laws applicable to Scheduled Areas, from laws promoting and regulating urban development to laws dealing with evacuee, enemy, ancestral and religious property, this vast legal apparatus governs the lives of ordinary citizens and their interactions with each other and the state. And yet, citizens, and even government remain unaware of this labyrinthine structure in its entirety. We hope that this publicly available database will not only empower citizens, but also help government streamline these laws in a manner that will help protect people’s livelihoods, even as we promote investments in land, and ultimately eliminate land disputes, thereby helping us achieve a peaceful, just, and humane society.

The land acquisition project seeks to comprehensively review the law of land acquisition in India starting from the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and up to the drafting and enforcement of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.

Though only 8.6% of the total population, the Scheduled Tribes (ST) constitute 40% of the people displaced since independence due to the construction of dams, mines, industrial development and the creation of wildlife parks and sanctuaries. Poverty and landlessness are rampant amongst the STs. 47.1% of all STs are below the poverty line in rural areas as compared to 33.8% for the national average, whereas 28.8% of all STs are below the poverty line in urban areas. In spite of being the only group with constitutional protections for their land rights, 9.4 % of the STs are landless compared to 7.4% for the national average. Therefore, clearly, this group has disproportionately borne the burden of economic development.

This, despite the fact that the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution carve out a separate legal and administrative framework for certain designated tribal majority areas within the territory of India. The Fifth Schedule designates tribal majority areas in ten tribal minority states within peninsular India including, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Rajasthan. The Sixth Schedule designates such tribal majority areas in north-eastern states, including Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura. Of these, Meghalaya and Mizoram are tribal-majority states.

This begs the question as to why despite the existence of special constitutional and legal provisions for safeguarding the rights of tribals to land and also special affirmative action provisions for the STs, they continue to remain the most displaced, most vulnerable, and most impoverished of all groups in India. Through archival and field research, the CPR Land Rights Initiative project on ‘Land Rights in the Scheduled Areas of India’, attempts some preliminary answers to this question.

Metamorphoses is a modest effort to try and bridge the gap between digital technologies, which are transforming our lives, and our understanding of their multiple dimensions. It will unfold in a series of nine interactions covering different aspects of the digital revolution. While the keynote on May 2, 2018, will look at the big picture – the nature of technological change and its interplay with individual and social attitudes – following sessions will attempt to demystify the unique jargon through which new technology is projected on to our lives. Further sessions will delve into issues relating to data privacy and cyber security as well as the emerging legal regime to regulate this critical domain.

This series will examine the impacts of digital technologies on the human psyche and on societies – exploring ways in which some of the negative elements may be mitigated. There will be a peep into the future – of what machine learning and artificial intelligence may bring to human experience – and the moral and ethical dilemma associated with these.

The objective of Metamorphoses, which seeks to assemble acknowledged thought leaders from India and abroad, is to inform and educate society about both the power of new technologies to change our lives for the better but also to alert ourselves to the risks that are attached to them. Risks that must be confronted and overcome as the future continues to unfold before our eyes relentlessly.

The idea behind Metamorphoses – unpacking the paradox of digital transformation

Our world is in the midst of rapid and unprecedented transformation driven by the accelerating advance of scientific thought and technological innovation in multiple domains, which are increasingly interlinked through digital processes. In no other era of history has mankind acquired the power, as it has today, to order life with a sense of deliberate agency.

The scale and speed of technological change is bringing immense benefits to humankind, generating instruments that can help eliminate poverty, disease and hunger. For example, the internet is making it possible, as never before, for cultures to interact, engage as well as share information, experiences and solutions across national boundaries, making this truly an era of knowledge. Similarly, greater understanding of the biology of the human brain and organising patterns among neural networks are leading to advances in artificial intelligence.

Yet, it is also true that technological advance is running ahead of the capacity of the human mind to comprehend and adapt to it. The adaptive capacity of societies as a whole is even less. More critically, the platforms used for communication and engagement have also become the purveyors of hate and exclusion. They are diminishing both privacy and human dignity. While digital technologies can empower the individual by expanding democratic freedoms, in the hands of a predatory state, these may become an instrument of subjugation.

We are, therefore, living a paradox.

The growing disconnect between technological advance and its impact on individuals and society at large is the defining challenge of the digital age. Individuals and societies, therefore, need to comprehend both the positive and negative aspects of the digital revolution and be in an informed position to manage this paradox.

Join us in this journey of metamorphosing

We hope that Metamorphoses will impart useful knowledge about our digital inheritance. But more importantly, we hope that this knowledge will lead to wisdom without which we may end up with mechanisms without meaning.

We look forward to you joining us on this journey of multiple explorations and interacting with us through our social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and our blog.

The Metamorphoses team of NITI Aayog, India International Centre (IIC) and Centre for Policy Research (CPR).

Mapping Power aimed to provide a state-level perspective on India’s electricity governance. The project explores who the various stakeholders and organizations are in each state, what their views and perspectives are, and how they will be affected by new initiatives in India’s electricity sector. More details on the project are in this background note.

Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States, an edited volume by Navroz K Dubash, Sunila S Kale, and Ranjit Bharvirkar, is the culmination of a two-year effort tracking the power sectors in 15 Indian states. With chapters written by fifteen scholars of politics and electricity, the book maps the political and economic forces that constrain and shape decisions in electricity distribution. The authors argue that a historically grounded political economy analysis helps understand the past and devise reforms to simultaneously improve sectoral outcomes and generate political rewards.

India’s interstate river water governance is dominated and determined by disputes and their resolution. The history is driven by exigencies and contingencies of disputes’ emergence and recurrence. As an outcome of this, the ecosystem for enabling cooperation is almost non-existent. Conflicts emerge when cooperation enabling mechanisms fail. This partly contributes to the long-drawn and intractable disputes. Disputes resolution itself has to build on an ecosystem for cooperation. In the absence of a resilient ecosystem for cooperation, disputes persist and recur.

In spite of an apparent non-existent ecosystem for cooperation, India has a remarkable track record of interstate river water cooperation. The Central Water Commission (CWC) has compiled 160 interstate river water agreements in 2015. Yet there is little or no work engaging with this track record – scholarly or otherwise. This is yet another reflection on how disputes dominate policy and public discourse in India. This research, supported by the Ministry of Jal Shakti, Government of India makes humble beginnings to critically engage with this track record. The larger goal is to understand why do states cooperate over river waters? Under what conditions?

This is a collaborative activity between CPR and CWC. The objective is to update the compilation towards a comprehensive repository of interstate river water cooperation in India, and produce a synthesis for informing policy thinking about an ecosystem for interstate river water cooperation.

With funding from the Asia Foundation, the Indian Development Cooperation Research (IDCR) project is in the process of developing a comprehensive database of Indian development assistance and publicly disseminating narratives on Indian bilateral development partnerships.

Indian development assistance has changed remarkably since its inception shortly after its independence. The size and diversity of its development partnerships has grown markedly over the past decade, nearly doubling in volume by some estimates. Moreover, Indian development assistance today is comparable to the foreign aid budgets of smaller, high-income European countries with one large difference: the Indian development cooperation budget is growing at a rate which is significantly higher than all but those of other emerging market economies.

Yet despite a large and rapidly growing development assistance programme there is little public understanding of the different grants and loans of which it is comprised. In trying to better understand Indian development assistance there are two major stumbling blocks: the lack of a comprehensive, consistent, and internationally comparable database on Indian development cooperation, and the absence of a narrative about India’s development partnership. We at IDCR aim to bridge this gap.

The IND-URBBS program is constructed around understanding how outcomes in urban settlements, e.g. occupational structure, delivery of basic services and broader aspects of citizenship are affected by the interaction between citizens and the State in three types of sites (i) ‘census towns’ vis-à-vis statutory towns (ii) informal settlements in large cities vis-à-vis formal settlements of similar nature; and (iii) peripheral settlements inside the municipal boundaries of the city vis-à-vis settlements outside the boundary. The project facilitates young researchers, especially PhD students, who are exploring these questions in various contexts within India. In this, CPR partners with University of Burdwan in West Bengal and Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Mumbai.

The project is funded through the JEAI program of the French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) or IRD and builds upon an earlier research project on subaltern urbanisation (SUBURBIN), in which CPR worked with French institution Centre de Sciences Humaines (New Delhi) and French Institute of Pondicherry.