Working Papers

Delhi is India’s richest city and as the capital of the nation has long enjoyed favourable treatment from the Centre. As the home to the country’s national bureaucracies, it also benefits from a large base of secure, well-paid, government jobs. Over the last decade the city has grown at an averag...

Existing studies of the quality of tuberculosis care have relied on recall-based patient surveys, questionnaire surveys of knowledge, and prescription or medical record analysis, and the results mostly show the health-care provider's knowledge rather than actual practice. No study has used standa...

Consumers’ participation in regulatory decision-making in infrastructure sectors can be critical to ensure effective regulatory governance. Providing avenues for enabling consumers’ voice in the regulatory process expands the information base available to regulators in their decision-making, and ...

While there is growing attention to climate policy, effective coordination, design and implementation of policy require attention to institutional design for climate governance. This paper examines the case of India, organized around three periods: pre-2007; 2007–2009 and 2010-mid-2014, providing...

With innovation in the genetic engineering now being rewarded in the form of intellectual property rights, there are new things that are beginning to count as property and as objects of human invention – plant varieties, seeds, germplasm, genetic sequences, DNA and so on. To bring the realm of “b...

With innovation in the genetic engineering now being rewarded in the form of intellectual property rights, there are new things that are beginning to count as property and as objects of human invention – plant varieties, seeds, germplasm, genetic sequences, DNA and so on. To bring the realm of “b...

We present among the first direct evidence on the quality of healthcare in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly-representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of M...

We combine newly created data on per student government expenditure on children in government elementary schools across India, data on per student expenditure by households on students attending private elementary schools, and the ASER measure of learning achievement of students in rural areas. T...

Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was launched to address the growing challenges of urbanization by improving infrastructure, governance and the quality of life in cities. This paper assesses all the four sub-missions under JNNURM i.e UIG and BSUP for big cities and UIDSSMT...

The process of urbanization in terms of workforce patterns is largely considered to be unidirectional – increasing engagement of the workforce in non-agricultural occupational pursuits. Using a unique database matching Census data on rural settlements for 2001 and 2011, this paper shows that this...

Recent years have seen significant changes in the landscape of elementary education (EE) in India. Yet, updated estimates on public and private expenditure on EE are not available. This paper fills the gap by providing a methodology and estimates of per student public expenditure on children enro...

Public sector service delivery in India is notorious for its low coverage, poor quality and high corruption. This is in striking contrast to the political commitment to inclusive development, and the aspirations of the Indian Constitution. The last decade has seen extensive efforts to change the ...

The paper extensively reviews India’s centrally sponsored programme for improving drinking water supply coverage in rural settlements. The first section of this paper seeks to describe the current status and general understanding of the problems related to rural drinking water delivery in India. ...

In the opening pages of “The Indian Ideology” Perry Anderson criticises leading Indian scholars for uncritical and inflated claims of India being a successful, indeed exceptional, democracy. Our subaltern historians and political analysts on the extreme left are equally dismissive. Many of the ...

The Delhi Master Plan 2021 introduced the "In-situ rehabilitation" approach to slum redevelopment, in which residents of Jhuggi Jhopdi Clusters transition to temporary housing while the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) reconstructs the settlment, and then shifts the slum-dwellers back onto the o...

Abstract: Climate litigation is in its infancy in India. Climate-related claims have yet to be litigated in the courts. There are a few cases in which climate change has been referred to but only in passing. This situation may well be set to change. Climate change and its impacts are rapidly capt...

The unexpected increase in the number of census towns (CTs) in the last census has thrust them into the spotlight. Using a hitherto unexploited dataset, it is found that many of the new CTs satisfied the requisite criteria in 2001 itself; mitigating concerns of inflated urbanisation. The new CTs ...

The origins, course, consequences and lines of resolution of the Siachen imbroglio have been so misunderstood, confused and even mismanaged by Indian policy makers over the years that we stand in some danger of scoring another own goal in J&K in favour of Pakistan. The singular unwillingness ...