Center for Global, International and Regional Studies

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common theme of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from June 2010 to March 2014, is the India’s struggles with economic policy reform. The essays are organized into several broad topical groupings, and chronologically within each section. The first section considers overall development goals, followed by a group of essays on foreign investment in retailing, financial inclusion and tax reform. This is followed by a section on macroeconomics and international finance, including several discussions of inflation policy and exchange rate policy. Two short sections discuss aspects of the corporate sector and job creation. The last section covers several topics: water, food, intergovernmental transfers and rural road construction.

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common themes of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from August 2010 to June 2014, are issues of growth and innovation in India, considered in two sequential parts, each part ordered chronologically. Topics considered in the first part include the quality and limits of economic growth, rights and other aspects of well-being, spatial dimensions, and drivers of growth. The second part examines innovation in the context of manufacturing, education, information technology, management and tax incentives.

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common theme of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from September 2010 to June 2014, is the issue of governance in India, and how politics combines with societal and institutional structures to shape the quality of governance. The essays discuss corruption, citizenship, effective delivery of public goods and services, taxation and the evolution of democracy at different levels of the Indian polity. The collection begins with the corruption surrounding the Commonwealth Games, and ends with the implications of India’s recent, potentially path-breaking general election. 

This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common theme of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from October 2010 to May 2014, is the issue of how India is finding its place in the world, after a history of colonization and post-colonial suspicions. The essays discuss rebalancing the world economy, the G20 and India’s place in that newish grouping, foreign policy and comparisons to the US, China and Russia, cultural and financial impacts of globalization, and the role of India’s diaspora. The concluding essay considers some global positioning options, good and bad, for India’s new government. 

We examine two recent cases of relative Left success—the Battle of Seattle and Occupy Wall Street—and argue that in each case an effective dynamism between radical and reform wings drove gains. This analysis is not meant to deny political difference and hawk false unity. Instead we want to challenge the luxury of mutual dismissal with the actually existing benefits of movement dynamism. By dynamism we mean contributions arising from different activist wings and productively interacting to increase overall movement power. Our ultimate claim is that the North American Left will yield greater success by becoming more self-conscious about the concrete benefits of movement dynamism.

This paper explores community-organized, household water supply in seven communities in western Kenya. We compare water use, labor use, income and the conditions for collective action in three sets of communities: two have protected springs and piped homestead connections; two have protected springs but no homestead connection; and three draw potentially contaminated water from unprotected springs. We find that piped water reduces the work of women and girls, and facilitates home garden and livestock production. Together these changes lead to increased household incomes. Women recognize clear time-benefits. Men, however, experience extra work. No overall pattern emerges regarding the preconditions for collective action. 

The experience of Mexico’s 2002 transparency reform sheds light on the challenge of translating the promise of legal reform into more open government in practice. An innovative new agency that serves as an interface between citizens and the executive branch of government has demonstrated an uneven but significant capacity to encourage institutional responsiveness. A ‘‘culture of transparency’’ is emerging in both state and society, although the contribution of Mexico’s transparency discourse and law to public accountability remains uncertain and contested.

This paper describes the ways that households, and particularly women, experience water scarcity in a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, through heavy expenditures of time and money, considerable investments in water storage and routinized sequences of defer red household tasks. It then delineates three phases of adaptive water and social engineering undertaken in several informal settlements by the Nairobi Water Company in an ongoing attempt to construct effective municipal institutions and infrastructure to improve residential access to water and loosen the grip that informal vendors may have on the market for water in these localities.