The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
In 1993, India introduced quota-based political reservations for women in rural areas with the objective to promote gender equality in human development by making rural service provision and local governance inclusive and responsive to the needs of women. Recent evidence shows that reservation policies for women stimulate the political participation …
Doing Business investigates the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing Business in India 2009 presents quantitative indicators to measure the regulations affecting 7 stages in the life of a business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing …
Studies on Resident Welfare Associations draw attention to their predominantly middle class and exclusive character. Based on survey and ethnographic data on such associations across diverse neighbourhoods in Bangalore, this paper reveals the fractured, often contradictory, nature of claims made by different sections of middle class. The category urban
Solutions to contemporary environmental challenges will require dialogue and learning among stakeholders with different perspectives. Moreover, enhancing the potential for social learning can be seen as a strategy for meeting the inherent complexity and uncertainty on global change. Social learning processes have been studied in the context of co-management of …
The need of the hour is to amend the 73rd Amendment to promote women's equal participation in three tiers of panchayats. All women's organisations and civil society organisations should form a common platform with a single agenda.
The public sphere as conceptualised by Habermas is a bourgeois institution that had emerged in European countries as a "discursive platform" to engage in critical discussion and deliberations with the idea of delivering "common good". The institution has been replicated in many countries including India. But the institution as a …
Denied rights, aggrieved citizens abstain from voting having lost their means to earn a living, communities are increasingly using their vote to drive home the message they distrust the State. Tribals who lost their agricultural land in a forest area because of faulty implementation of forest rights laws in Maharashtra …
The international Commission on Climate Change and Development is launching its final report on the 14th of May at the UN, with participation of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The work of the Commission has focused on adaptation to climate change, its links with disaster risk reduction and how the strengthening of …
The Maoists want a provision in the electoral rules to arm the voter with the right to reject a candidate, but if the voters are granted such a provision, will they allow them to participate in the elections, or still insist on boycotting them? It is high time the Maoists …
The positive association between the service sector share of output and per capita income is one of the best-known regularities in all of growth and development economics. Yet there is less than complete agreement on the nature of that association. This paper identify two waves of service sector growth, a …
