Governing India: Evolution of Programmatic Welfare in Andhra Pradesh

How can clientelistic politics be transformed into programmatic politics in a subnational state with a well-recorded history of patronage politics? We explore institutional pathways away from clientelism by systematically explicating clientelistic propensities with programmatic citizen-oriented ones in undivided Andhra Pradesh. This paper engages with a paradigm shift in policy from clientelistic to programmatic service delivery in rural development by exploring three major rural welfare programmes in undivided Andhra Pradesh: need-based redistribution, evolution of self-help groups and implementation of the right to work in India through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme. We argue that the capacity of the state to deliver owes a great deal to bureaucratic puzzling and political powering over developmental ideas. We combine powering and puzzling within the state to argue the case for how these ideas tip after evolving in a path-dependent way

Governing India: What do we know and need to know?

This paper is part of the Heidelberg Inaugural Lecture delivered in the Alte Aula on 15 November 2017, and of a public lecture delivered at the centre for Economic and Social Sciences in Hyderabad. It presents a view regarding state capacity in India after discussing the extensive literature on clientelism. It proposes that state capacity in India has much to do with the way in which the central and sub-national states cogitate about policy goals and the means to achieve them. For example, is import substitution or export promotion the way to grow? Will growth trickle down to the poor or is nonmarket re-distribution the way to alleviate poverty? These issues are debated between puzzling bureaucrats and powering politicians, and when they reach a tipping point, we see that the state finds capacity to deliver even in a liberal democracy like India. The paper proposes a tipping point model for understanding state capacity in the Indian liberal democracy. It suggests a way for liberal democracies to fight clientelism and develop the capacity to pursue their goals, even though these goals are often unrealized

Governing the taxation of digitized trade

The paper highlights the challenges for international taxation due to digitized trade. Digitization makes it easy to penetrate foreign markets without the need for physical presence in the buyer’s country. This phenomenon has generated debates on the salience of source versus residence-based taxation, the definition of permanent establishment, and, the administration of consumption taxes. The WTO has not been able to engage effectively in this area. The paper notes both the inadequacy of unilateral approaches and the need for an international organization for setting and monitoring global standards. It commends the vitality of source-based principles and the traditional conception of permanent establishment. It pleads for increased international cooperation for administering consumption taxes. Digitized trade without globally acceptable standards is likely to lead to double taxation or tax evasion or both

India since 1980- Ch. 1: Four Revolutions and India's Future

For the better part of the past three decades the Indian polity has been in the throes of four revolutionary changes. They are in the realms of political mobilization, secularism, foreign policy, and economic policy making. These transformations have not moved in tandem but have overlapped with one another. Nevertheless, they collectively represent a steady and potentially fundamental remaking of many features of the Indian political landscape

Optimal rate control in a quasi-static wireless fading channel with throughput and power constraints

We propose a novel recursive algorithm for determining the optimal admission and transmission rates for an M/M/1 transmitter buffer for obtaining minimum average queue length, under quasi-static fading, while satisfying a throughput constraint with given available transmit power. The optimal rate setting policy is obtained with significant savings in memory and computational complexity, and is simple and easy to implement

India and South Asian security

The South Asian region has witnessed a high level of insecurity ever since the region became independent from colonial rule. This condition has persisted even after the end of the cold war. Our paper looks at the Indian threat perceptions, the Indian responses to such threat perceptions, and, the effects of the Indian response. The three principal sources of Indian threat perceptions have been Pakistan, China, and domestic insurgent groups. This paper con tends that the principle problem in Indo-Pakistan relations has been the problem of security dilemma, a condition where the increase in the security of a country, arouses fear in the hearts of its adversaries, thereby leading to a reduction in its security.South Asia, Security environment,

The Politics of Telecommunications Regulation: State-Industry Alliance Favouring Foreign Investment in India

This paper explores the political economy of three significant policy decisions of the Congress-United Progressive Alliance government between November 2005 and February 2006. These decisions improved the regulatory incentives for the smaller and efficient firms in the Indian GSM industry, which were heavily dependent on foreign investment for their expansion. India's telecommunications sector became more attractive to foreign investors as a result of these regulatory changes. This was a notable departure from the past when government policy had favoured large domestic investors using CDMA technology who were not dependent on foreign capital. A globalisation friendly policy change occurred after a Centre-Left United Progressive Alliance coalition came to power. The paper argues that these decisions, which promoted both competition and foreign investment, occurred due to the increased sensitivity of the Department of Telecommunications towards the needs of the relatively smaller GSM service providers, driven by considerations of efficiency. They were not driven by a crisis of private investment, foreign pressure, or stealth. The shift occurred in normal times when the Department of Telecommunications under a persistent ministerial stewardship took on a regulator, which was less interested in engineering this shift. This globalisation-friendly strategy depended to a large extent on the particular industrial sub-sector that the ruling party or coalition supported for spreading telecommunications in India.