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.
Historically, economic globalisation has witnessed cycles of stability and capital accumulation followed by deep contestations that disrupted the prevailing order. The periods of instability were often accompanied by a power transition where the dominant powers were unable to organise or govern the economic system. New economic and geopolitical centres rose to wrest authority away from the declining powers over global economic governance.
In recent years, we appear to be confronting another inflexion point. Emerging economies, particularly the rising powers in the east, are increasing their geoeconomic and institutional footprints even as the previous proponents of globalisation seem to be taking a step back. This flux is not only reshaping the global North-South relationship, it is reviving older modes of economic order like regionalism and economic nationalism. The most recent era of interdependence and its unprecedented scale, suggests any dramatic shift in the globalisation processes would have consequences not just for world order but for the nature of trade, finance, development, innovation, ecology, and, for the internal politics of states.
The Centre for Policy Research is launching a new lecture series entitled “Globalisation in Question”, to closely examine these trends and their implications for India and the world. In these monthly interactive sessions, we will draw upon renowned scholars and practitioners to address specific undercurrents of globalisation and their impact on a variety of issue areas.
The CPR-TCPD Dialogues on Indian Politics brings together academicians, policy and political practitioners, and civil society actors to grapple with important social and political issues in India. It provides a forum for intellectually rigorous, non-partisan commentary to strengthen public discourse on politics in India. This dialogue series is an effort to understand the changing dynamics of Indian political parties, the impact of new and emerging social movements and the use of new instruments of mobilisation in our polity. The CPR-TCPD Dialogues is curated by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) at Ashoka University. Founded in 1973, CPR is one of India’s leading think tanks, providing rigorous policy research on a variety of issues. Founded in 2015, TCPD is among India’s most well-respected institutions working with political data, providing data-driven research, policy work and journalism on India’s political life by producing and disseminating in open access scientifically collected and treated political data. The CPR-TCPD Dialogues leverages the unique strengths of these two institutions to provide rigorous and innovative commentary on India’s social and political challenges.
There has been a rapid increase in the number of digital options in the context of livelihoods. This project aims to describe the ecosystem of digital platforms and the opportunities it offers for women’s work. It studies the ways in which women are being able to leverage the increasing diversity of the ecosystem to improve their economic livelihood opportunities and to socially empower themselves. It also investigates how digital platforms and apps are responding to the diversity of engagement possibilities and the changing nature of women’s work. The project explores these questions in India and Sri Lanka to delineate within country and comparative insights on how engagement and outcomes are affected by differences in ecosystems, and provide policy insights on the same.The project is part of a consortium called Women, Work, and the Gig Economy supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and coordinated by the JustJobs Network.
This research analyses the political, institutional and socio-ecological aspects of urban construction, housing and infrastructure projects in Indian cities. The research uses the case study method to analyse and theorize the regulatory gaps, citizen’s actions and social and legal contestations related to these projects. The research interrogates the discourses of commercialisation of public lands, Transit Oriented Development, urban redevelopment and renewal and urban sustainability that are part of mainstream urban planning lexicon today. The research aims to strengthen the meaningful interface between urban, ecological and environmental planning.
CPR’s Environmental Justice Program is an action research program implemented in collaboration with Namati, a legal empowerment organisation. The program studies issues and questions regarding environment law design, institutional action and public participation in India’s industrial, coastal and mining regions. Through its activities, the program aims to build an epistemic community geared towards finding solutions to environmental governance challenges.
The program has been operational since 2012. With field presence in four states , the program has produced several research reports, policy briefs and submissions and IEC materials on themes related to environment law and justice. The program has developed and implemented the method of community led groundtruthing to generate alternative, ground-up information and data on the environmental performance of projects and industries. The program’s network of field, legal and policy researchers generate qualitative and quantitative data relevant to understanding environmental regulation at a micro level.
Goal: Evaluation of utility of geolocalisation of dengue case clusters for subsequent intervention during the inter-epidemic periods. This tests the use of novel vector control methods focussing on inter-epidemic periods rather than confronting the mosquito during the epidemic period.
The bulk of India’s buildings are yet-to-be built, and their long lifespans make the risk of energy and carbon lock-in higher in India than anywhere else. At the same time, the early stages of India’s buildings sector provides an opportunity to examine and inform practices that will significantly influence the country’s energy, development, and climate change agenda. This work sets out to define India’s buildings stock as a field of socio-technical enquiry, with technical, institutional and behavioural levers that can reduce future energy demand and carbon emissions.
CPR-CWC Dialogue Forum is a collaborative activity between CPR and the Central Water Commission (CWC), pursued under the MoU between the Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS) and the CPR to establish the MoJS Research Chair – Water Conflicts and Governance at CPR.
CPR-CWC Dialogue Forum is a forum where CPR’s research interests and CWC’s practitioner perspectives converge to discuss, debate and critically engage with contemporary water policy governance challenges. It has particular interests in interstate river water disputes and transboundary river water governance.
The Forum is also a space to network and engage with wider groups of stakeholders for a vibrant policy discourse. It hosts distinguished scholars, practitioners and civic society actors to share their research and experiences. These interactions are organized as talks, targeted consultations (focused on specific issues), and dissemination workshops.
The talk series organized by the Forum are promoted as TREAD Talks, after the program that the MoJS Research Chair leads: TREADs (Transboundary Rivers, Ecologies and Development studies). TREAD Talks have so far addressed variety of issues and themes. We welcome interests to share your work in this forum.
