Working Papers

The Union Budget of 2022-23 promises to take issues of sustainability and climate change seriously. And indeed, its framing on these issues is promising and forward looking. For example, it promises a low-carbon development strategy, tied to job creation, and sees the climate change agenda as an ...

The setting up of the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) represents a significant milestone for air quality management in India. The Commission’s ability to perform its functions effectively and facilitate measures that will improve air quality in the NCR and adjoining areas for the lon...

India’s poor water security indicators are partly a result of the poor translation of federal spirit in governing its water resources. The limited scholarship on the subject recognizes the vacuum in federal water governance and the weak articulation of Centre’s role to work with states in pursuin...

With the continuing emergence of Covid-19 variants, there is underlying concern in all countries, including India, that another surge will occur in the coming months. In case of a surge like that experienced with the Delta variant, a strategy that deserves further attention for the provision of c...

The National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) provide the basis for assessing air quality nationally, determining pollution control priorities, and defining what we consider to be acceptable air quality to protect public health. They are framed and issued by the Central Pollution Control Boa...

Air pollution exposure is a year-round, nation-wide public health crisis in India. This paper presents a careful reading of nearly eleven hours of discussions on air pollution that took place in the upper and lower Houses of Parliament in November 2019. The discussions provide unique insight into...

This book seeks to illuminate the multifaceted challenges of introducing change and transition in low-capacity settings and documents the process of implementing an education reform in Delhi, India.

The conversation about a climate change law in India is fast growing. Just in the past few months, a series of documents such as reports and op-eds proposing an Indian climate law, and a private member’s bill (listed for introduction to parliament) and a draft law on climate change have begun to ...

This draft discussion paper makes a case for debating the large conceptual questions surrounding climate change legislation before hastily arriving at solutions or jumping to the drafting procedure. It explores the chief questions of principle that would influence the form and structure of an Ind...

The Fundamental Right to Property enjoys the unique distinction of not only being the second most contentious provision in the drafting of the Indian Constitution, but also the most amended provision, and the only fundamental right to be ultimately abolished. The debate over property rights began...

The Fundamental Right to Property enjoys the unique distinction of not only being the second most contentious provision in the drafting of the Indian Constitution, but also the most amended provision, and the only fundamental right to be ultimately abolished. The debate over property rights began...

The world is moving ahead rapidly to reshape trading and economic relationships. Major developments that affect India and the rest of South Asia include the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Vietnam’s free trade agreements with the European Union and the United Kingdom, the US-Mexico-C...

Algorithms have an overpowering influence on our lives in this era of rapid digital transformations. Technology companies are deploying algorithms in many ways, for example, to demonstrate rankings and search results for purposes of data collection, personalise user experience and show dynamic pr...

This paper, the first in a series of three papers, constitutes the first systematic legal attempt since the late nineteenth century to describe the changing configuration of property rights of zamindars (landlords) and ryots or raiyats (peasants) relative to the English East India Company in colo...

Reforms designed to address core issues and their sequencing and timing would be critical to ensure the eventual success of the latest initiatives in the power sector. Lessons from the experience of earlier sectoral reform programmes and recommendations regarding the general architecture of centr...

COVID-19 produced an acute and widespread crisis of hunger across India, which was felt most acutely by migrant workers and those who were outside the reach of India’s highly organised but rigid Public Distribution System (PDS). The hunger was incidental to the actual disease itself, but severe e...

The novel SARS-CoV-2 virus shows marked heterogeneity in its transmission. Here, we used data collected from contact tracing during the lockdown in Punjab, a major state in India, to quantify this heterogeneity, and to examine implications for transmission dynamics. We found evidence of heterogen...

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has proposed a new notification to supersede the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification 2006 that is currently in force. The Ministry has sought comments from the public on this draft EIA Notification 2020. Shibani Ghosh, Fellow, CP...