Ideas for India

India, and many developing nations in other parts of the world take solace in the U-shaped Kuznets curve: a belief in this inverse relationship between income and environmental quality results in not enough efforts...

With the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, work from home became the norm in 2020. However, even though mobility restrictions have been lifted, many workplaces all over the world continue to follow a model of remote or...

India’s relatively young population, the pace of adoption of smartphones and digital technology, and rapid urbanisation has contributed to the growth of digital labour markets. In recent years, we have seen the...

Public discourse around automation has seen some take a fairly alarmist view – with concerns around its impact on employment, wages, the labour share of national income, and inequality. Others take a more optimistic...

Policy responses to Covid-19 have been a mix of fiscal and monetary policy – with the latter doing the heavy-lifting in both developed and developing countries. Against this backdrop, in this edition of I4I...

Several commentators have lauded the recently presented Budget 2022-23 as a ‘growth budget’, on account of the large allocations made for capital expenditure on public infrastructure. On the other hand, concerns have...

As India is now completing 75 years of Independence, two big questions loom over the conversation around India’s economic development: How successful was the Indian economy before and during colonial rule, as compared...

In 2019, the Ministry of Jal Shakti set up a committee of independent experts – led by Dr Mihir Shah – to draft a new National Water Policy. To examine the recommendations made by the Committee, Ashwini Kulkarni speaks...

Published in February 2021 by the UK government, the ‘Dasgupta Review’ calls for changes in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world. Against the...

How did human society evolve from being organised predominantly around large kin-based networks, to one with strong notions of individualism? To examine this question, Joseph Henrich (Harvard University) and Patrick...

With the advent of globalisation, the struggle between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ – as defined in Marxian terms – rapidly evolved from one between economic ideologies, to cultural wars. In this context, I4I Editor-in-Chief...

In June 2021, Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee (Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, MIT) delivered the inaugural Shaibal Gupta Memorial Lecture organised by Asian Development Research Institute, broadly...

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it significant challenges for the education sector. On the one hand, closing schools meant imposing a heavy cost on a whole generation of students, and on the other hand...

कोविड-19 के प्रसार को कम करने के लिए लागू किए गए लॉकडाउन के कारण अनेक प्रवासी मजदूरों ने अपना रोज़गार गँवाया और उनमें से करीब 30 लाख से ज्‍यादा प्रवासी दूसरे राज्यों से बिहार लौट चुके हैं। इस विषय पर प्रोफेसर फरजाना...

In conversation with Ashok Kotwal on the ongoing economic crisis caused by lockdown to mitigate Covid-19 spread, Pronab Sen breaks down the problem into survival of individuals and livelihoods, and the survival of...