Archives: Working Papers

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. The second section looks at the course policy has traversed in over 60 years of planning. How has policy perceived the constraints to achieving universal access and sought to address them over time? The third section critically analyses the limitations of the existing understanding and response and explains why improved outcomes are unlikely in this situation and an alternate approach is needed in the scheme of Centre State transfers. The fourth section suggests an alternative design for the scheme to transfer funds from the Centre to the States as the key intervention to alter the situation. The final section discusses the prospects of such a design being adopted.

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 relationship between citizens and the state, through the granting of substantive rights to social and economic goods and building the foundations of a welfare state in India. The emphasis has been both on expanding provisioning and transforming the every day workings of the state by shifting the dynamics of interaction between state and citizens. This paper seeks to place the emergence of India’s welfare state within a conceptual framework, and evaluate early experiences, focusing especially on implementation. Our assessment undertakes a diagnosis of the specific mechanisms that the rights and accompanying accountability instruments are seeking to influence, through an analysis of how “the state” works. In particular, we focus on understanding how the specific reform instruments promoted through the rights-based approach have been articulated and absorbed into the everyday practices of the state. Such an analysis is important because the ultimate outcomes of this transition will depend, to a great degree, on the interplay between the new transparency and accountability instruments, bureaucratic structures and incentive systems, and local patterns of political and civil society behavior. Our central thesis is that while the rights-based approach and measures to institutional social accountability have brought some gains, these remain limited. In many cases, they have led to distortions in the political and bureaucratic system rather than deeper change. It is suggested that a fundamental shift will require more extensive administrative reforms, and that this will only occur when aligned with political processes.

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 enrolled in government schools, and per student private expenditure on children enrolled in private unaided schools, for major states in India for the year 2011-12. The paper also provides estimates of total (public and private) expenditure on EE.

Our findings indicate that India spent 1.75% of the GDP (centre and states combined) on EE, while private expenditure was at least 0.71% of the GDP in 2011-12. Richer states spent less on EE as a % of their GDP but more in terms of absolute amounts, compared to the poorer states. Preliminary analysis indicates a strong relationship between per student public expenditure and learning levels.But this does not mean that more expenditure is needed to improve learning levels because government expenditure on EE is highly inefficient. It produces low levels of outcomes at high expenditure. Changing this requires prioritising learning outcomes and demanding accountability toward learning outcomes from all officials, above everything else.

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 process is not straightforward and is characterised by considerable variation and unpredictability. This poses several questions regarding policy implementation, and particularly, on where the focus of the government’s ‘RURBAN’ initiatives should be.

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 and IHSDP for small towns and cities. The analysis of all the four sub-missions of JNNURM affirms the notion of metropolitan bias that attributes greater policy attention and resources to the larger cities as compared to the small towns. The analysis proceeds to discover that a larger share of urban population resides in the small towns under UIDSSMT and IHSDP as compared to the large cities under UIG and BSUP. The paper proceeds to discuss the consequences faced by the smaller towns as a result of this bias that leads the smaller municipalities to further stagnation, leading to a higher incidence of urban poverty, poor performance in the delivery of basic services and project implementation. The paper finally attempts to emphasize the benefits of small town development that can help neighbouring villages access urban amenities, employment and eventually aid their transformation into urban centres.

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. The combination of these three sources allows us to compare both the “accounting cost” difference of public and private schools and also the “economic cost”—what it would take public schools, at their existing efficacy in producing learning, to achieve the learning results of the private sector. We estimate that the “accounting cost” per student in a government school in the median state in 2011/12 was Rs. 14,615 while the median child in private school cost Rs. 5,961. Hence in the typical Indian state, educating a student in government school costs more than twice as much than in private school, a gap of Rs. 7,906. Just these accounting cost gaps aggregated state by state suggests an annual excess of public over private cost of children enrolled in government schools of Rs. 50,000 crores (one crore=10 million) or .6 percent of GDP. But even that staggering estimate does not account for the observed learning differentials between public and private. We produce a measure of inefficiency that combines both the excess accounting cost and a money metric estimate of the cost of the inefficacy of lower learning achievement. This measure is the cost at which government schools would be predicted to reach the learning levels of the private sector. Combining the calculations of accounting cost differentials plus the cost of reaching the higher levels of learning observed in the private sector state by state (as both accounting cost differences and learning differences vary widely across states) implies that the excess cost of achieving the existing private learning levels at public sector costs is Rs. 232,000 crores (2.78% of GDP, or nearly US$50 billion). It might seem counterintuitive that the total loss to inefficiency is larger than the actual budget, but that is because the actual budget produces such low levels of learning at such high cost that when the loss from both higher expenditures and lower outputs are measured it exceeds expenditures.

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 Madhya Pradesh. We report three main findings. First, private providers are mostly unqualified but spent more time with patients, and completed more items on a checklist of essential history and examination items than public providers, while being no different in their diagnostic and treatment accuracy. Second, we identify the private practices of qualified public sector doctors, and show that the same doctors exert higher effort and are more likely to provide correct treatment in their private practices. Third, we find a strong positive correlation between provider effort and prices charged in the private sector, whereas we find no correlation between effort and wages in the public sector. Our results suggest that market-based accountability in the unregulated private sector may be providing better incentives for provider effort than administrative accountability in the public sector in this setting. While the overall quality of care is low in both the public and private sectors, these differences in provider effort may partly explain the dominant market share of fee-charging private providers even in the presence of a system of free public healthcare.

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 “biology” within the ambit of intellectual property, to juridify aspects of the biological as products of human invention is to bring new epistemic objects into visibility. While these are revealed through practices of biotechnology, law translates it into a capacity for monopolistic appropriation for biotech innovators. The new correlatives of innovation and intellectual property re-engineer not just the biology of an organism, but the very categories that organized property and intellectual property. What instrumentalities of technology and law co-produce biotic property? I examine these instrumentalities in a two paper series: while the first paper sought to lay out the work of technology in the creation of new biological artefacts, and consequently new economic spaces and property claims, the second paper seeks to examine the role of law in translating inventive claims as property claims.

ISBN: 978- 93- 81482- 08- 7

Savings provides the means for investments. Typically, investments are primarily funded through domestic savings and the rest through foreign capital inflows. Domestic savings are from three sources — households, private and public sector. Household savings form the largest part of total savings. As domestic savings contributes the most to capital formation, it can also be a limiting factor to investments. The paper deals with changing pattern of Household savings, its shift away from capital (financial) markets towards unproductive assets like gold and possibilities of channelization household savings to investment rather than speculative assets. The paper looks at the current policy incentives in terms of tax to boost capital market investment and whether it has served the purpose of long term capital formation. The current savings environment indicates a high proportion being in physical rather than financial assets. Within financial assets derivatives are preferred over the cash equity. We propose that an investment of incentive structure should support a pyramid where the small investors would hold maximum in the less risky assets and reduce the holdings as they move towards risky assets. Our paper is organized as, section (2) studies trends in current macro-economic scenario in terms of the savings; section (3), deals with, the capital formation and share of capital markets in terms of raising new capital. In section (4), we look at the current investment pattern in Indian capital markets and the incentives provides to boost trading in the equity and derivative products. Section (5) we give our proposal on the layered approach to investment architecture. Finally, section (6) concludes the paper.

The recent uproar about the toxic levels of pollution in the country’s national capital region has once again brought to fore the failure of the regulatory and legal mechanisms in India to control air pollution. Despite an early legislative acknowledgment of the issues relating to air pollution, and regulatory mechanisms set up consequently, India has not been able to restrict the sharp upward trajectory of air pollution. While several issues with regard to the legal and regulatory regime governing air quality in the country deserve serious and urgent consideration, this paper focuses on one issue in particular – the liability regime for violation of air quality standards. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the relevant provisions of the law pertaining to liability – civil and criminal – for causing air pollution. The second part identifies three critical issues that have emerged in the current liability regime: (1) the Pollution Control Boards do not have the power to levy penalties; (2) criminal prosecution is not an effective solution; and (3) the National Green Tribunal Act does not provide complete relief. The third and final part of the essay proposes a way forward. It is suggested that the Pollution Control Boards need to be granted additional enforcement powers, and administrative fines for violations should be introduced, albeit with certain conditions.

Suggested citation: Shibani Ghosh, ‘Reforming the Liability Regime for Air Pollution in India’, IV Environmental Law & Practice Review (forthcoming 2015).
A version of this paper has been accepted for publication by the Environmental Law & Practice Review (ISSN 2319-1856) published by NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.