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 account for almost 30% of the urban growth in last decade, with large inter-state variations. They are responsible for almost the entire growth in urbanisation in Kerala and almost none in Chhattisgarh. Consequently, the estimated contribution of migration is similar to that in previous intercensal periods. Further, while some new CTs are concentrated around million-plus cities, more than four-fifths are situated outside the proximity of such cities, with a large majority not even near Class I towns, though they form part of local agglomerations. This indicates a dispersed pattern of in-situ urbanisation. A growing share of urban population in these CTs is thus being governed under the rural administrative framework, despite very different demographic and economic characteristics, which may affect their future growth.
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 account for almost 30% of the urban growth in last decade, with large inter-state variations. They are responsible for almost the entire growth in urbanisation in Kerala and almost none in Chhattisgarh. Consequently, the estimated contribution of migration is similar to that in previous intercensal periods. Further, while some new CTs are concentrated around million-plus cities, more than four-fifths are situated outside the proximity of such cities, with a large majority not even near Class I towns, though they form part of local agglomerations. This indicates a dispersed pattern of in-situ urbanisation. A growing share of urban population in these CTs is thus being governed under the rural administrative framework, despite very different demographic and economic characteristics, which may affect their future growth.
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 capturing the popular imagination in India. There is a growing recognition of the importance and urgency of the climate challenge, and a slew of climate policies and initiative at the national and state levels have been launched in response. India has an engaged and proactive civil society, an activist judiciary, a progressive body of enviro-legal jurisprudence, and an unparalleled culture of public interest litigation. This suggests not just that there are potential litigants waiting in the wings but also that climate-related claims are likely to be favorably entertained by the judiciary.
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 is critical for ensuring sustainability of policy and regulatory decisions. However, in the reform process of many developing countries’ power sectors, the primary focus has been on the sector’s technical aspects, with inadequate effort to improve the experience of consumers, whether through better quality of service or by ensuring their participation in the regulatory process. This shortfall has often undermined the public’s understanding of and demand for reforms, often reflected in political reversal of key policy decisions. This paper examines the level and quality of consumer participation and protection in five states in India through a review of documents, surveys of consumers, and detailed interviews with key stakeholders. As mandated by law, all states have established standards of performance regulations and set up grievance redressal mechanisms; however, these bodies have not reached the desired level of effectiveness. Similarly, although provisions for consumer participation in regulatory proceedings exist, their adoption is often symbolic and without substantive and deliberative participation. Drawing on analysis of the Indian experience and international best practices, the paper recommends a paradigm shift in pursuing enhanced consumer satisfaction and voice in regulatory decision-making as a central objective of power reforms.
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 standardised patients to assess clinical practice. Therefore we aimed to assess quality of care for tuberculosis using such patients.
We did a pilot, cross-sectional validation study of a convenience sample of consenting private health-care providers in low-income and middle-income areas of Delhi, India. We recruited standardised patients in apparently good health from the local community to present four cases (two of presumed tuberculosis and one each of confirmed tuberculosis and suspected multidrug-resistant tuberculosis) to a randomly allocated health-care provider. The key objective was to validate the standardised-patient method using three criteria: negligible risk and ability to avoid adverse events for providers and standardised patients, low detection rates of standardised patients by providers, and data accuracy across standardised patients and audio verification of standardised-patient recall. We also used medical vignettes to assess providers’ knowledge of presumed tuberculosis. Correct case management was benchmarked using Standards for Tuberculosis Care in India (STCI).
It is a widely accepted truth that the Indian state suffers from a serious crisis of implementation capability. Despite widespread recognition of this crisis, there is remarkably little analytical work on how the Indian state works, particularly at the level of implementation. We know very little about the everyday practices of local bureaucrats, the decision-making systems within which they function and the organizational culture and norms that this fosters. Such an understanding is critical both to unpacking the roots of this implementation failure as well as to understanding how reform efforts are institutionalized, interpreted and implemented on the ground. Crucially, it can offer insights into understanding why the implementation crisis persists and under what conditions this can be reversed. Our research is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing an attempt by the Government of Bihar (GoB) to adopt an alternative pedagogy tool in government schools to improve the quality of learning as part of a larger reform effort called the ‘Mission Gunvatta,’ initiated in the 2013-14 academic year. The pedagogical strategy was based on homegrown experiments that challenged mainstream assumptions about classroom organization and teaching based on set curricula. Critically, it was designed to strengthen local administrative capacity to support schools from the bottom up. Through detailed qualitative interviews and time-use studies of Bihar’s education administrators, this study points to the critical role played by organizational culture and resultant perceptions and practices of frontline administrators in interpreting, articulating and implementing reform choices on the ground. In our analysis, the successes and failures of service delivery reforms are as much about appropriate policy design choices, fostering innovation and leadership as it is about the interplay between reform objectives and the every-day practices of those tasked with implementing reforms. This, we argue, is the key missing link in contemporary understanding of public institutions and service delivery reforms in particular.
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 seeks 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 would seek to examine the role of law in translating inventive claims as property claims.
ISBN: 978- 93 -81482- 07-0
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 institutional charts for each. Several key themes emerge. First, the formation of climate institutions have frequently been driven by international negotiations, even while filtered through domestic context. Second, once established, institutions tend not to be stable or long-lasting. Third, while various efforts at knowledge generation have been attempted, they do not add up to a mechanism for sustained and consistent strategic thinking on climate change. Fourth, coordination across government has been uneven and episodic, reaching a high point with a specialised envoy in the Prime Minister’s Office. Fifth, the overall capacity within government, in terms of specialised skills and sheer numbers of personnel remains limited. Sixth, capacity shortfalls are exacerbated by closed structures of governance that only partially draw on external expertise. Seventh, institutional structures are not explicitly designed to enable India’s stated objective of climate policy in the context of development, which implies specific attention to co-benefits and mainstreaming.
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 average real rate of 10 percent, and has benefitted from a dramatic increase in large-scale infrastructure development. Yet, despite these advantages, Delhi is a deeply divided city marked by layers of social exclusion.
In the modern imaginary, the city represents the promise of freedom and opportunity. It marks a social space that is less constrained by traditional identities and one in which greater social interaction and density support economic dynamism. If development must, as Amartya Sen has so influentially argued, be based on strengthening basic capabilities, then the city can surely be a privileged site of capability-enhancement. Indeed, the migrants who flood the city often come in search of better livelihoods, education, health, and basic services. But as any resident of Delhi knows, the quality of such services varies dramatically across neighbourhoods, and the part of the city one lives in significantly impacts one’s ability to take full advantage of what the city has to offer. The Cities of Delhi (CoD) project starts with the simple recognition that India’s capital is marked by different settlement types, defined by diverse degrees of formality, legality, and tenure, which taken together produce a highly differentiated pattern of access to basic services.
This report provides an overview of the findings from CoD. It builds directly on the place, process, and institution reports available at citiesofdelhi.cprindia.org, but in no way substitutes for these reports, all of which stand on their own as original empirical contributions. This overview is instead a synthesis, an effort to tie together the findings from the reports, to paint a broad picture of patterns of unequal access to basic services in the city and to provide an analysis of how these patterns of inequality are linked to structures and practices of governance.
There are two dominant narratives about taxation. One is taxes are the “price we pay for a civilized society” (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). In this view taxes are not a necessary evil (as in the pairing of “death and taxes” as inevitable) but a positive good: more taxes buy more “civilization.” The other view is that taxes are “tribute to Leviathan”—a pure involuntary extraction from those engaged in economic production to those who control coercive power producing no reciprocal benefit. In this view taxes are a bane of the civilized. We consider the question of taxes as price versus tribute for contemporary India and make three points. First, most discussions of government budgets focus on allocations across sectors and activities, focusing on the accounting cost of services provided. But if the accounting cost exceeds the economic cost (the minimum at which the good or service could have been provided), then the difference can be considered “tribute.” Second, to the extent that government engages in activities which would not have otherwise been carried out at all but which citizens value, the “price of civilization” is maximized. In contrast, when government budgets produce private goods at such low quality they are valued at zero by many, then those taxpayers consider this tribute. Third, the structure of social spending between “insurance”-like programs which benefit all individuals at various states or stages of life, and sharply targeted transfer programs determines whether most taxpayers consider taxes to fund these expenditures a price or tribute. The notion of a “compulsory purchase” versus “tax” helps elucidate this difference, and sharp targeting is seen as raising the price to any given individual of a given degree of individual benefit. Taken together we argue India needs more taxes as price of civilization but less taxes as tribute, which currently dominate. There is currently a sharp contradiction between the needs for greater revenue mobilization for India to continue its progress and provide the increasingly sophisticated “civilization” demanded with higher productivity and incomes, and the perception of the “middle class” that most taxes are tribute. This contradiction is created by a costly and yet ineffective state the solution to which can neither be a weaker state on the one hand nor more tribute paid to dysfunction on the other, but rather a better state.
Several countries have embarked on nationwide processes to devise their ‘contributions’ towards a new global climate agreement set to be adopted at Paris in 2015. Sixty-two countries have already communicated their contributions to the UNFCCC, in pledges covering around 62.9% of global emissions in 2012. These contributions, formally known as ‘intended nationally determined contributions’ (INDCs) are expected to be the bedrock of post 2020 climate action and the building blocks of the 2015 climate deal, that is currently being negotiated by Parties. This paper discusses the emergence of this concept and outlines some of the legal and technical aspects of a contribution and their implications on ambition, adequacy and political feasibility. Section 3 analyses pledges in the submitted INDCs, with a special focus on G20 countries.
The term ‘INDC’ first emerged in 2013 at the Warsaw negotiations of the Conference of Parties (COP) in a decision inviting Parties “to initiate or intensify domestic preparationsfor their intended nationally determined contributions….. and to communicate them well in advance of the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (by the first quarter of 2015 by those Parties ready to do so)” For developed countries, INDCs will replace their Kyoto Protocol commitments; for developing countries, Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) will continue to be in force as implementation tools supporting the mitigation component of their INDCs.
Over the past year, countries have been negotiating to iron out differences on issues like differentiation, legal nature, scope, form and review of contributions with varying levels of success on each front. These issues are discussed in greater detail below
