Public discourse in India has been dominated by a heated debate on how to address the endemic corruption in India’s public institutions. The agitation for the Lok Pal bill and the ensuing discussions has brought the role of anti-corruption institutions and accountability mechanisms to the heart of this debate. As potential solutions begin to emerge, it is important to reflect on current experience and take stock of lessons learned from India’s on-going efforts to build accountability systems and to address corruption. The key to designing an effective solution will lie in understanding the conditions under which solutions can work as well and the challenges they are likely to face.
This paper is an effort to contribute to this debate through an analysis of the experience of implementing one such accountability mechanism – social audits in the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP). Using Government Reported data on social audits and data collected through interviews with key government officials, this paper examines the accountability effects of regular, reliable institutionalized social audits in the state.
This working paper is an effort to trace the landscape of citizen-led efforts to hold the state accountable in India. It first offers an analytical narrative of the evolution of thought and practice in public accountability till the current emphasis on citizen-led accountability initiatives, and then after a quick overview of the different mechanisms and instruments through which citizens have begun to scrutinize the state it identifies some of the key limitations in the current discourse on citizen-led accountability initiatives, arguing for a research agenda that addresses some of these issues.
Interstate water disputes in India often prolong over long periods and tend to recur. The Cauvery dispute tribunal was constituted in 1990 and the final award was given in 2007, after 17 years. The 2nd Krishna water dispute tribunal, constituted in 2004, gave its final award recently in December 2010. These long delays are partly due to elaborate judicial proceedings and deliberations. But more importantly, the adjudication proceedings are often circumvented and impeded by variety of political interests. The aleatory nature of politics reshapes the nature and extent of a dispute and contributes to its frequent recurrence. Discourses of policy and governance reforms usually do not account for this contingent nature of politics.
This paper explores ideas of regulatory diffusion and transplant. I suggest that the existing literature, which focuses on channels of diffusion and macro-contextual variables of sectors and countries, insufficiently accounts for how the nature of institutional outcomes are shaped by the way regulatory agencies are adopted and embedded into national political economies. In particular, using the case of Indian electricity regulation, this paper suggests that when adoption is driven less by national policy choices, and more by the role of external actors, such as multilateral donor agencies, there is little scope for ex ante deliberation of the role regulatory agencies can and should play within national governance systems. Instead, the functioning of regulatory agencies are better explained by ex post adjustment, as agencies seek to accommodate existing political pressures, accompanied by efforts to explain and justify the foundational myth on which regulator adoption was based. Regulatory outcomes are then incompletely explained by macro-context and institutional form alone, but instead require understanding micro-details of local political and institutional arrangements.
This argument is explicated with reference to the process through which regulatory agencies entered the Indian electricity sector, and further detailed with reference to tariff setting and public participation processes in three Indian states. While tariff setting illustrates ex post rationalization of decision making that remains deeply politicized – in contradiction to the founding narrative when regulatory agencies were created – public participation processes show that the introduction of regulators can introduce a ‗policy irritant‘ that stimulates creation of a new political space in Indian electricity governance. Based on these discussions, the paper argues for attention to micro-politics and local specificities of the process through which regulatory agencies are embedded in national political contexts. This argument serves as a corrective to the literature that currently focuses dominantly on ex ante country and sector conditions in seeking to explain regulatory transplant and performance.
India claims to be undertaking a thorough transition to low-carbon electricity, stepping up renewable energy and energy efficiency efforts. Yet, two puzzling paradoxes weigh upon this dynamic. First, although energy efficiency measures offer high collective returns, at least as high as those for renewable energy, the energy efficiency agenda is receiving a lot less attention and priority, even though it would require significantly less investment. Second, within the energy efficiency domain, implementation is lower and slower in sectors where the savings potential is the highest, notably among agricultural and domestic (household) consumers. Drawing on a range of interviews, documentary analysis and policy observations, this paper helps to shed light on this conundrum. In particular, it points out the discrepancy between individual and collective incentives in promoting energy efficiency, the biases and weaknesses of Indian governance at both the central and state levels, the influence of lobbies, the weight of parallel governmental agendas, and the built-in preference of the government, as well as international donors, for a technological rather than a governance focus. Nonetheless, striking a new balance between energy efficiency and renewable energy as complementary agendas is of crucial importance if India is to achieve its developmental, social, environmental and energy security goals.
While about 70% of Indian electricity is carbon-based, a quarter of the nation’s consumption goes into agriculture, to extract groundwater for irrigation. Improving the energy efficiency of Indian agriculture is thus a critical issue for the world at large, from both a climate change and energy security perspective. Yet, the picture is made immensely complex given the entrenched policy of providing “free power” to farmers since the Green Revolution of the 1970s. Over the past two decades, a neo-liberal discourse shared by many Indian and international technocrats has emerged that frames “free power” as a unilateral problem that leads to economic inefficiencies affecting utilities, the state governments but also the farmers themselves through the unfair allocation of subsidies. The solution that is hence most advocated is to revise and increase tariffs and to improve the technical efficiency of India’s 23 million pumps. Key international donors have promoted this line of thinking, making higher tariffs and universal metering a precondition for financing power-sector reforms.
Through qualitative data gathered in interviews and fieldwork in four Indian states (Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and West Bengal), this work challenges this perspective. It contends that the raising of electricity prices would deeply and unavoidably aggravate rural poverty as well as endanger food security. Whether one likes it or not, moreover, electricity subsidies have become a cornerstone of rural politics in India, as the Congress Party hegemony was challenged by regional parties with strong support among the peasantry. Both pragmatism and effectiveness now call for looking at “free power” as a constraint to work with, rather than a problem to work against. At the same time, concentrating solely on technically improving the efficiency of pumps might further aggravate the speed at which water tables are depleted. There is thus a need to first optimise water demand in agriculture through a broader approach to the water-energy nexus. This would include massive state investments to improve surface irrigation, groundwater table management, irrigation technologies, agricultural practices (including organic agriculture and crop diversification) as well as India’s food procurement policies. The support of the international community, we believe, should be rethought in this light.
How have India’s Supreme Court judges behaved towards minorities detained under anti-terror laws? Do judges make distinctions between the religious and political affiliations of the accused in anti-terror cases? If so, why, and under what conditions? The paper investigates these questions through a probability analysis of anti-terror cases.
The Centre for Policy Research has, during the previous years conducted a number of examinations for assisting various public undertakings in finding suitable candidates to fill in posts both at the clerical and officers’ level. the Centre also conducted entrance examinations for various universities / institutes for admission to different courses. In most of these examiations there is a mix of obective and subjective tests. these tests are used to determine which person can perform most efficietnly and accurately and would be likely to contribute most to the development of his / her organisation or would benefit most from a course of study or training.
CPR WORKING PAPER SERIES
CPR WORKING PAPER NO. 25
There should be equality of opportunity for all citizines in matter relating to employment or appointment to any office under the State. No citizen shall, on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, residence or any of them be uneligible for or discriminated in respect of, any employment or office under the State. Only such data about the candidates are to be collected as are relevant to determine his eligibility and suitability for the job and only such employment practices are to be adopted as can be “shown to be related to job performance”. …
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 or inability to look at the bare facts defies understanding. How did India come to be hopelessly trapped in a web of Siachen follies? Where does responsibility lie for this inexplicable strategic slumber ?
