Research topics in public policy India

The National Education Policy of India 2020 is a significant policy document laying the national-level strategy for the new millennium. It is ambitious and claims universal access to quality education as its key aim, keeping with the Sustainable Development Goal 4 of the United Nations Agenda 2030. One of the highlights of the NEP is its emphasis on mother tongue education at the primary levels in both state- and privately owned schools. The present paper critically assesses the NEP 2020, primarily in relation to the language-in-education policy. The paper argues that it presents a contradiction of intentions, aspiring towards inclusion of the historically disadvantaged and marginalised groups on the one hand, while practising a policy of aggressive privatisation and disinvestment in public education on the other.

The Third Eye of Governance: Rise of Populism, Decline in Social Research by Dr N Bhaskara Rao, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2021; pp 301, 599, Paperback.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a catena of contractual disputes. The paper synthesises the Indian Contract Act and relevant case laws to present a legal position on force majeure , frustration of contract and contractual gaps, in the context of COVID-19. Using the economic analysis of law, it examines contractual disputes from various sectors, including power, construction and real estate, rental, event management and hospitality, and analyses these disputes from legal- and economic-efficiency points of view. Where contracts are not a good instrument for achieving equitable distribution of economic gains and losses, public policy is better suited to address equity and other related issues arising from long-term contracts.

While the response to COVID-19 by the Government of India has been more or less uniform across the country, in that a lockdown was imposed throughout, the death rate has varied across the states. This suggests that region-specific factors are likely to be relevant to the determination of this rate. A significant aspect of this study is the use of three different measures of the death rate in the empirical exercise. This showed all three measures of the death rate to be strongly related to health expenditure as a share of the gross domestic product but hardly at all to public health infrastructure. This can be interpreted as a sign of the role of the public health systemcomprising medical personnel, infrastructure and protocolsin the prevention of death, with health expenditure as a key determinant of its effectiveness. It has an implication for public policy beyond the immediate health emergency due to COVID-19.

Public Policy: A View from the South by Vishal Narain, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018; pp x + 213, 495.

Design thinking as a subject has grown enormously in theoretical content over the past 50 years. However, both design thinkers and policymakers have not come closer to developing design thinking in policymaking. Recognising this research gap, a prototype called the basic resource gap model has been designed as a supplement to the extant fiscal rule, with fiscal deficit as its target. The study highlights both the potential applicability of the design-thinking approach to the process and specifies an application that can supplement the extant fiscal rule and potentially enhance fiscal management.

The academic and policy worlds have drifted apart since the early years of the Indian Republic. Can a new Public Policy field help reconnect academia to policymaking? The genesis and evolution of Public Policy in the United States holds important learning lessons. The raison d'être of Public Policy, the academic discipline, is to aid and inform public policy, the process; sans state imprimatur, cross-institutional coordination and demand-scoping, discrete supply-driven initiatives are unlikely to have substantive impact. Public Policy has considerable scope in India, provided academia and government join hands to create a policy ecosystem for meeting the specific challenges of Indian governance.

Persistent hunger and pervasive malnutrition are serious problems in the developing world. Recent literature suggests that well-designed public policies towards provisioning of social protection/security and strengthening of support measures to smallholder agriculture appear to be effective in reducing hunger and malnutrition. An investigation of the role of public provisioning on social protection in combating hunger using the recent evidence for 64 countries in the global South makes a strong case for a substantial push in public provisioning in favour of social protection, which, along with other policy measures, could play a vital role in strengthening national food security. Further, low levels of per capita income must not become an excuse for addressing the most basic human needs, as adequate fiscal space can be created even at low levels of income.

In the light of the experience with the severe financial crises of the 1990s, the responsibility for financial stability has implicitly been assigned to public policy, overturning, in a sense, the dominant paradigm until then of regarding financial development, including stability, as a function best performed by the financial markets. This paper undertakes a critical examination of this assignment, its magnitude and quality, by questioning its analytical underpinnings. The paper examines the search for the appropriate international financial architecture as the virtuous approach to the assignment and concludes that the identification of international standards and codes for adoption by countries may be a suboptimal approach. On the other hand, establishment of an international bankruptcy mechanism holds promise of filling a major gap in the efforts to strengthen the international financial architecture.

Most earlier studies exploring the cross-ountry variation in the degree of income inequality [measured by Gini ratio] are valuable but for the inappropriate data on inequality comprising estimates of Gini from incomparable data sets such as national and sub-ational surveys, per person and per household income distributions, and income and expenditure distributions. This paper explores the cross-ountry variation in income inequality based on relatively more comparable data and suggests that public policy aimed at reducing inequality and freedom may be the key variables that explain the variation in the Gini across countries. Prospects for launching national policy initiatives to reduce inequalities are rather dim since globalisation could be conveniently used to rationalise a relatively high level of income inequality.

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