The State is, and will, remain for the conceivable future, given the trajectory of our economy, the primary vehicle of empowerment, of dignity and status .....
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Dual control of the IAS is at the heart of the federal structure. The Delhi ordinance challenges it. It can create fissures between Centre, states .....
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Here is the irony: Despite this plethora of political announcements, India has not witnessed a significant expansion in its welfare spending .....
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India’s experiment with grassroots democracy, 30 years after the creation of local government institutions, highlights the dangers of overcentralisation. .....
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New models piloted by Andhra Pradesh and Brazil show a path beyond political posturing, and ensuring fiscal sustainability, certainty of benefits and innovation. .....
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Too often, debates on State capacity veer in the direction of setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and efficiency. .....
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Data from the 2023 Economic Survey illustrates an enduring tension in the dynamics of Centre-state relations that constrains policy reforms. .....
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Paper in the form of files, circulars, government orders are at the heart of India’s bureaucratic tradition .....
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In the pandemic years, the government made a concerted effort to clean up its act and restore the credibility of its fiscal math .....
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If public spending in India is to improve, the burden lies on us to remind ourselves of the 'people’s reality' every budget season. .....
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Given the centrality of welfare in the BJP’s electoral discourse, it is important to ask if there is a distinct BJP welfare model. If so, how do the two different narratives.....
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The battleground for substantive democracy in India has largely been outside the electoral arena in the form of citizen-led mobilisations. In 2023, when state polls will domin.....
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The evolution of India’s welfare state tells the story of the power and possibility of democratic participation—one that has shaped national and global discourse. .....
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The 'consultant' performing functions outsourced to them by government is a global phenomenon. .....
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Rather than relying on new infrastructure projects, which are both capital-intensive and slow to start, the focus must be on the maintenance of existing infrastructure, writes.....
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Welfare schemes in India are 'targeted' based on eligibility criteria laid down by the State. .....
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Citizens in this formulation are enablers of government working toward fulfilling its goals, rather than active, rights-bearing stakeholders. .....
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Over the decades, an elite obsession with getting the state out of the way has left a majority of Indians without the power to claim any real economic freedom. .....
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Each time cases surged, schools were the first to close and only restarted in person months after every other economic activity had resumed. .....
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The articles in this series seek to make sense of the many manifestations of political and economic centralization in India today, with a particular focus on the historica.....
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Applying a political economy lens to the recently announced Budget 2022-23, Yamini Aiyar contends that the emphasis on capital expenditure over welfare in the two Budgets.....
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The future of Indian federalism rests on how contradictions created by new distributive pressures and political delimitation are negotiated. .....
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Intergenerational mobility in India is low. Those born poor are likely to stay poor, as inequities are entrenched. Now consider what two years of school closure will have done.....
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There is grim news on education. But the silver lining is that the pandemic forced innovation. Build on it .....
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Involve parents; decentralise decision-making; and give schools greater autonomy for expenditure. Local innovation is the path forward. .....
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India's grand bargain, once heralded as a new era in cooperative federalism, the Goods and Services tax regime, less than fours years since its adoption, is today the new batt.....
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The second wave will deepen inequality. Expand support to states, universalise PDS, and ramp up MGNREGS now. .....
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The Centre and states are at war, but India urgently needs a coordinated response. It’s not too late. But soon it will be .....
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Either Modi govt is expecting a revenue windfall that will be passed on to states, or states will be squeezed even further. My guess is it will be the latter. .....
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The FM made a good faith attempt to present her vision. But the budget lacked a diagnosis of what is wrong, a prescription to address it, and made baffling choices. .....
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The scheme needs a higher budget. Finance it by rationalising the regressive subsidy regime .....
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With its historic mandate, and ambitious targets, the government could have embarked on structural reforms. But Narendra Modi has yet again opted for an incrementalist approach......
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The Narendra Modi government needs to take some immediate steps to improve the implementation of the MGNREGS......
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Welfare in Modi’s first term was about grand announcements and ambitious targets. The real challenge of building a high quality 21st century welfare state awaits......
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Leveraging technology for effective program delivery poses unique challenges. Technology is a tool that requires a capable state to be effective; also, it creates new.....
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Even as schemes have received minimal allocations, this budget signals an important shift in the political narrative. Gone is the focus on jobs, skills, aspirations and empowerment. Read more at .....
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Networking and building relationships with politicians is for teachers a necessary survival tactic and therefore a legitimate activity, relegating teaching to the background. Teachers, on their part,.....
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Even as schemes have received minimal allocations, this budget signals an important shift in the political narrative. Gone is the focus on jobs, skills, aspirations and empowerment......
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There were no surprises—no helicopter drop of money into Jan-Dhan accounts, no move to dismantle ongoing welfare schemes in favour of a universal basic income (UBI). Far from being the populist, gam.....
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It should lay to rest the ongoing debate about this government’s attempt to radically restructure India’s welfare architecture......
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The demonetisation sop is a unique opportunity to evolve the maternal and child health agenda into a universal Maternity Benefits Programme in the budget......
Read More >>On the 1st of February 2017, the Finance Minister will present his 4th budget to the nation. Like every year, the budget speech will be followed by a slugfest as political parties and commentators arg.....
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Despite emphasis on ’empowerment’ over ‘entitlements’, which comes with its own set of problems, health and education remain invisible in the Modi government’s social policy agenda......
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An important ask of budget 2017 is a reformed Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan with a commitment to achievable learning goals and the speedy transfer of money......
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quality of healthcare, regardless of whether this is provided in the private or public system, is the elephant in the room.24/01/2017 Poor quality of healthcare, regardless of whether this is provide.....
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The lack of institutional capacity at the grassroots to deliver sanitation services is the key binding constraint to achieving Swachh Bharat......
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A rethink of the role of the centre to go beyond current effort of tinkering with financing instruments and return to first principles can determine an optimal allocation of functions across all lev.....
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Arun Jaitley’s Budget was high of rhetoric, but this doesn’t quite add up to a clear vision and narrative for social policy. Overall, social sector expenditure, excluding rural development, has i.....
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October 2, 2016 marked the second anniversary of the launch of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) - an event that most will remember for the photo-ops of the Prime Minister sweeping the streets of Lutyens De.....
Read More >>The frontline administration in India is infamous for corruption and patronage, indifference towards citizens, low effort and high absenteeism. This blog reports findings from a year-long qualitative.....
Read More >>The frontline administration in India is infamous for corruption and patronage, indifference towards citizens, low effort and high absenteeism. This column reports findings from a year-long qualitativ.....
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The frontline administration in India is infamous for corruption and patronage, indifference towards citizens, low effort and high absenteeism. This blog reports findings from a year-long qualitative.....
Read More >>There is no political will to hand over the powers and resources to local govts to respond to peoples needs. On April 24, 2013, India celebrated the 20th anniversary of the passage of the.....
Read More >>India has a strong, vibrant economy with a confident middle class, but governance — especially the capacity to deliver basic amenities such as education and health — is its greatest weakness. For.....
Read More >>Elementary education administrators at the block level primarily perceive themselves, or report themselves to be, disempowered cogs in a hierarchical administrative culture that renders them powerless.....
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In the run-up to every budget season, public debate on social sector schemes inevitably turns to the question of the paltry sums allocated. True to script, the question of allocations and potential bu.....
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Has Narendra Modi been able to bring the ‘efficiency’ and ‘decisiveness’ he was known for as chief minister into running the country?.....
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While there has been an overall increase in social sector allocation, these are by no means significant. Yamini shares her thoughts on the 2016 budget and the social sector......
Read More >>In this article, Yamini Aiyar, Director of the Accountability Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research, proposes a novel approach to governing public financing of elementary education that would g.....
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As the example of education shows, India’s bureaucratic reforms are falling short of maximising governance - See more at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/post-office-state-education-burea.....
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As the example of 16 block education offices in four states shows, school officials, burdened by paperwork, find little time for meaningful interaction with students, teachers and parents.....
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Mind the gap—and find the money to bridge it.....
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Sloganeering apart, one interpretation of this government’s approach to social policy is that it quite simply doesn’t want to have one.....
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Original article was published in Huffington Post India available .....
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This is an article written in the ASER 2016 Report on the Annual Status on.....
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भारत की स्थानीय नौकरशाही भ्रष्टाचार और भाई-भतीजावाद, नागरिकों की �.....
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पहले ब्लॉग में, हमने बिहार में प्रारम्भिक शिक्षा के परिवेश और कामकाज के संबं.....
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I promised, in my previous blog to offer some new thinking on the role of CSSs in t.....
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In December 2013, my colleagues and I were about to embark on a new project in Bihar. In April that year, the Government of Bihar had announced the launch of an ambitious, innovative scheme called.....
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This piece was written based on the ASER report released in 2014, and was published in January 2015 and still holds relevance to the state of education bureaucracy today......
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What does it take to build an administrative eco-system that substantially shifts frontline behavior to focus entirely on the conundrum of learning in India’s classroom? This is the question that.....
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The Accountability Initiative (AI) at CPR has conducted extensive research on fiscal devolution in two separate studies—one that focuses on the effects of the Fourteenth Finance Commission recommend.....
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Elementary education policy in India is, as economist Lant Pritchett characterizes it, in a ‘Big Stuck’. Stuck because despite money being poured in to the system – funding for elementary edu.....
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I had almost forgotten, till I saw a copy at a friend’s office yesterday, that every year in Parliament’s budget session, apart from presenting the annual budget, the Government of India tables.....
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Responding to a Parliamentary Question in December 2009, the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution revealed a worrying truth -since 2006, 5,300,000 bogus ration cards ha.....
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From the right to education to the right to food, solving our development problems by clothing India’s citizens with new rights seems to be the flavor of our times. What should we make of this ri.....
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Recently, in a move that has been rightly acknowledged as the first tangible step toward radically overhauling the Five-Year Plan process, the Planning Commission unveiled a new approach to the Twe.....
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This blog post is the first of a series based on experiences my colleagues and I had while implementing an information campaign on school expenditures aimed at mobilizing Parent Tea.....
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On Friday, relevant ministries in the Government of India and the National Advisory council are going to start a round of negotiations to finalize the much awaited food security bill. The key issue up.....
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What prompts collective action for accountability? Information campaigns are premised on the assumption that information can act as a catalyst for mobilizing collective action. Yet, experience sugg.....
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Do development funds reach India's poor? Back in the mid 1980's, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi famously guesstimated that of every one rupee spent on development only 15 paise reach the poor. 25.....
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Recently, in a move that has been rightly acknowledged as the first tangible step toward radically overhauling the Five-Year Plan process, the Planning Commission unveiled a new approach to the Twe.....
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Responding to a Parliamentary Question in December 2009, the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution revealed a worrying truth -since 2006, 5,300,000 bogus ration cards.....
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I had almost forgotten, till I saw a copy at a friend’s office yesterday, that every year in Parliament’s budget session, apart from presenting the annual budget, the Government of India tables.....
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From the right to education to the right to food, solving our development problems by clothing India’s citizens with new rights seems to be the flavor of our times. What should we make of this ri.....
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On Thursday, the Supreme Court Bench passed an order upholding the disastrous MPLAD Scheme – claiming it was meant for p.....
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Yamini Aiyar, Director of the Accountability Initiative, assesses the performance of the UPA government. (Click on the image to enlarge text.) .....
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Speaking at the biennial conference of the CBI and State Anti-Corruption Bureaus, the Indian Prime Minister reflected on the ‘malaise of corruption’ that is ‘sapping our efforts to march ahead a.....
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Recently, Jaipur’s Rajasthan University played host to the first ever Jan Manch or public hearing to evaluate the operations of the state’s Information commission (SIC). Organized by a network of.....
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How do we deliver elementary education effectively and accountably to India’s children? This question is becoming increasingly more relevant as India begins work to implement the recently passed.....
Read More >>This paper examines the relationship between fiscal federalism and social policy in India through an analysis of the effects of a recent effort to increase fiscal decentralization to state governments.....
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About the Book India believed it could take development closer to its people, make the government more accountable, and empower women and oppressed communities through decentralisa.....
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Elementary education administrators at the block level primarily perceive themselves, or report themselves to be, disempowered cogs in a hierarchical administrative culture that renders them powerless.....
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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.....
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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 pa.....
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Education reforms, bureaucracy and the puzzles of implementation: A case study from Bihar It is a widely accepted truth that the Indian state suffers from a serious crisis of implementation capabil.....
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India embodies many perplexing contradictions in development. A middle-income country with a powerful diplomatic and economic presence at the global level, and citizens in business, science, and the a.....
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Elementary education policy in India is undergoing an important transition. For decades, the primary goal of the Indian Government’s elementary education policy was to create a universal education s.....
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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 priva.....
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This article was also published in the Financial Express on May 11, 2013. On the 24th of April 2013, India celebrated the 20th anniversary of the passage of the 73.....
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As some of you may recall, the PAISA team spent the better part of last year collecting and analyzing data on fund flows in elementary education finances in the 9 PAISA districts. This effort culminat.....
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Yamini Aiyar, Director, Accountability Initiative India’s elementary education system is at a crossroads. In 2009, the Indian Parliament passed the Right to Education (RTE) Act g.....
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Do repeated, regular social audits make a difference? Put a different way, do regular citizen-led efforts to demand accountability from government result in systemic changes in service delivery? Three.....
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India’s elementary education system is at a crossroads. In 2009, the Indian Parliament passed the Right to Education (RTE) Act guaranteeing the provision of free and compulsory education to all chil.....
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On Tuesday, September 20th 2011, President Obama formally launched the Open Government Partnership or OGP (see link1 and .....
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We are now entering the final lap of the PAISA surveys with only one of our nine districts (Jalpaigudi) still to go live. While it will take us a few months to analyze the data (watch out for the dist.....
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For the last two months the Accountability Initiative team has been busy with the district level PAISA surveys. The district PAISA surveys are our first attempt to develop detailed district level repo.....
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Yamini Aiyar, Accountability Initiative .....
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Can we resolve corruption without administrative reforms? I have been struck by how silent the current debate on anti-corruption has been on the question of administrative reforms. Even the far more c.....
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The PAISA survey is conducted annually through the Annual Survey of Education (ASER) –Rural. This is the second PAISA report. In 2009, the survey covered a total of 14231.....
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Since 2004, India’s education budget has more than doubled, increasing from Rs. 83,564 crore in 2004-05 to Rs. 1,91,946 crore in 2009-10. About 50% of this budget has been spent on elementary educat.....
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The United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) response to the crisis caused by the 2 G scam is monumentally shortsighted and runs the risk of losing what could well be a real opportunity for restoring ins.....
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The recently released Annual Survey of Education Report 2010 serves as.....
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A Review of the Working of the Karnataka State Human Rights Commission and the Commission for Women It is widely acknowledged that India’s accountability institutions – parliament, judiciary,ov.....
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Social Audits are now widely accepted as an important mechanism to address corruption and strengthen accountability in government service delivery. The process took root with the launch of the Nationa.....
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India’s education budget more than doubled in the last five years.....
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PAISA in Andhra Pradesh (AP) is being implemented with a slight twist – one which has taught us a lot! The district administration (read district collector) of Hyderabad city has in the last few mon.....
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Recently, in a move that has been rightly acknowledged as the first tangible step toward radically overhauling the Five-Year Plan process, the Planning Commission unveiled a new approach to the Twelft.....
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What prompts collective action for accountability? Information campaigns are premised on the assumption that information can act as a catalyst for mobilizing collective action. Yet, experience suggest.....
Read More >>
Do development funds reach India's poor? Back in the mid 1980's, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi famously guesstimated that of every one rupee spent on development only 15 paise reach the poor. 25 ye.....
Read More >>
This blog post is the first of a series based on experiences my colleagues and I had while implementing an information campaign on school expenditures aimed at mobilizing Parent Tea.....
Read More >>
On Friday, relevant ministries in the Government of India and the National Advisory council are going to start a round of negotiations to finalize the much awaited food security bill. The key issue up.....
Read More >>
Yamini Aiyar, Director of the Accountability Initiative, assesses the performance of the UPA government. (Click on the image to enlarge text.) .....
Read More >>
On Thursday, the Supreme Court Bench passed an order upholding the disastrous MPLAD Scheme – claiming it was meant for p.....
Read More >>
From the right to education to the right to food, solving our development problems by clothing India’s citizens with new rights seems to be the flavor of our times. What should we make of this rise.....
Read More >>
I had almost forgotten, till I saw a copy at a friend’s office yesterday, that every year in Parliament’s budget session, apart from presenting the annual budget, the Government of India tables an.....
Read More >>
Responding to a Parliamentary Question in December 2009, the Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution revealed a worrying truth -since 2006, 5,300,000 bogus ration cards ha.....
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Yamini Aiyar and Anit Mukherjee Elementary education policy in India is, as economist Lant Pritchett characterizes it, in a �.....
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Governments around the world have undertaken institutional reforms aimed at opening up spaces and inviting citizens to participate in directing and monitoring public service delivery. These spaces hav.....
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Yamini Aiyar How do we deliver elementary education effectively and accountably to India’s children? This question is becoming increasingly more relevant a.....
Read More >>
Recently, Jaipur’s Rajasthan University played host to the first ever Jan Manch or public hearing to evaluate the operations of the state’s Information commission (SIC). Organized by a network of.....
Read More >>
Speaking at the biennial conference of the CBI and State Anti-Corruption Bureaus, the Indian Prime Minister reflected on the ‘malaise of corruption’ that is ‘sapping our efforts to march ahead a.....
Read More >>
Last week the Hindustan Times .....
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Social accountability mechanisms can contribute to improved governance, increased development effectiveness through better service delivery, and citizen empowerment. However, critical to the success o.....
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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 discussion.....
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Through a literature review of key academic work on decentralization, this policy brief examines the effectiveness of rural decentralization in promoting inclusive, participatory and accountable gover.....
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Social accountability mechanisms can contribute to improved governance, increased development effectiveness through better service delivery, and citizen empowerment. However, critical to the success o.....
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How does a hierarchical, top-down state respond to efforts to become directly accountable to its citizens? This paper analyses this question through India’s experience with implementing social au.....
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This paper documents the Andhra Pradesh experience of institutionalising social audits into the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and uses it to analyse the social.....
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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 i.....
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