Review of Market Integration

This article documents, for a neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, India, what would be involved for current occupants to regularise tenure and register legal title. We show that the process of clearing title can be expensive, fraught with risks and perhaps impossible to complete for either the current occupants or the owners of record. Staying on the land in their current ambiguous status seems viable for now, but investing in further development is very risky. We discuss these findings in the context of the debate about providing secure tenure to slum dwellers from two perspectives: (a) the practicality of providing legal tenure as part of neighbourhood upgrading programmes; (b) the impacts on the real estate market of a system that leaves many private plots, in slums or elsewhere, in legal limbo and difficult to develop—in essence an anti-commons. Both issues are of critical interest as India faces the challenge of urbanisation.

JEL: R310, O170

This article while discussing global and national climate regimes brings out the need for designing and implementing climate projects locally. It brings to the forefront, the local realities in an Indian urban context. The article particularly highlights disconnects between high level thinking and local implementation realities. It goes on further to suggest a novel idea which is being tested to overcome these disconnects. Global climate regime will primarily constitute the UNFCCC processes, and national climate regime will primarily constitute the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) processes for the purposes of this article. The narrative of local realities brought out in the article is based on the work done at a locality in East Delhi through a prototype resilience centre. The centre conducted numerous community engagement activities, utilising an internally devised multi-stakeholder, participatory and inclusive framework. This prototype has managed to create an impact on the entire community through several interventions piloted with the involvement of strategic actors starting from January 2015 till date. The idea has been incubated within University of Delhi, and this article will present the concept of context integrity, which includes ‘nested’ relationships with larger institutions. That is, how an institution like University of Delhi can nest a small institution like the prototype resilience centre committed to larger goals of plugging the implementation gap which will bridge the disconnects between global climate regime and creation of local impact.

JEL: R-23

Regular supply of maintenance fund for water infrastructures in costal Bangladesh is a necessary condition for the existence of river embankments. This article reviews a number of efforts to identify rules and conditions helping the regular supply of maintenance fund. A number of studies have used experimental games to replicate a real-life situation. The experimental results show that participants from Local Government Engineering Department polders significantly contribute more than players from Bangladesh Water Development Board polders which indicate importance of institutional environment. Also, our study finds significant importance of economic homogeneity in the group as well as proportional sharing of benefits increases the level of contribution.

JEL: C93, Z13, D74

Infrastructure, through its direct and indirect effects, has a bearing on growth, equity and overall development of a country. Widening inequality has significant implications for growth and macroeconomic stability leading to suboptimal use of human resources and concentration of decision-making in the hands of a few. This article discusses the relationship between growth and infrastructure inequality in India since the 1990s. Tracing three dimensions of infrastructure inequality over time, this study tests the existence of its nonlinear relationship with growth. Empirical estimates reject the inverted U-shaped and U-shaped patterns between disparity in infrastructure and economic growth. Accelerated decline in infrastructure inequality is depicted with growth in India across infrastructure sectors of transport, energy and communication. Policymakers need to sustain efforts to eradicate infrastructure disparity by following a growth-oriented approach.

JEL: C38, H54, I3, O18, O47, R11

Pulses are the staple sources of protein for Indians and contribute significantly to their nutritional security. However, limited growth in domestic production, has led to India’s increased import dependence. India’s import of pulses almost doubled in the last ten years and is currently estimated to be more than 3 million tonnes. Imports account for 15–20 per cent of total domestic production. The article presents the factors behind stagnating pulses production, India’s vulnerability to pulses import shortage and thereby food security implications. It also suggests strategies to promote sustainable supply of pulses to ensure food security.

JEL: Q130, Q180, Q170, Q020, F680