XKDR Newsletter - Issue 18
Union's deviations from fiscal responsibility law • Fairness and legislation for virtual courts • Changing monsoon • Electricity and economic growth • Conference on the power sector reforms and more.
Understanding deviations from the fiscal responsibility law in India
Ajay Shah has co-authored a new paper with Pratik Datta, Radhika Pandey, and Ila Patnaik, that analyses the possible causes and explanations for the public finance deviations of the Union government from the strictures specified in law. In India, the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act, 2003, was enacted, to impose limitations on the Central Government’s borrowing powers, debts, and deficits. However, in most years following the enactment of the law, the budgeted and actual values were in violation of this law.
Policymakers and economists working on India’s fiscal rules have, for the longest time, attributed these deviations to the poor drafting of the statutory escape clause in the FRBM Act. In this paper, the authors argue that the reason for such deviations and violations is due to the escape clause built within the Constitution of India - the special procedure for money bills. This clause gives the Union Government the full ability to bypass the constraints imposed by Parliamentary law.
Read the full paper here and a short extract published in the Indian Express here.
Fairness and legislation for virtual courts
Moving to virtual courts can have significant gains for both the litigant as well as the court administration. It reduces the cost for a litigant to appear before the courts for hearings and saves judicial time and manpower as a judge is not required to physically preside over the court. However, existing procedural laws and safeguards in India do not permit the Indian judiciary to move to a fully virtual court model. In their article, Mugdha Mohapatra and Ajay Shah examine the foundations of fairness that should be present in the various elements of virtual courts. They undertake a detailed case stage-wise evaluation of the existing procedural laws, the Code of Civil Procedure (CPC), the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), and the Indian Evidence Act (IEA) and apply them to virtual courts.
Read the full article here.
OP-ED & COMMENTARY
In his column for the Business Standard, Ajay Shah writes about the ramifications for India, if climate change induces changes in Indian monsoon patterns. Among other mitigation strategies, he discusses the implications of climate change for farming households and the need for a well-functioning market system for agricultural produce and land.
The ESG revolution in a globally integrated financial system has closed off pathways to finance new thermal power plants. Ajay Shah in his article co-authored with Akshay Jaitly, uses CMIE Capex data to show the stall of thermal electricity projects and an increase in solar and wind projects. However, they assert that the growth of renewables may not yet be consistent with the possibility of high economic growth due to two chokepoints: the engineering transformation of the grid that is required for decarbonisation and the low level of trust in the private sector to work with the government.
EVENTS
We jointly hosted a Public Procurement Workshop with the Chennai Mathematical Institute on the 1st of September 2023. At the event,
Pavithra Manivannan and Charmi Mehta presented our work on Improving drugs procurement through a contract life-cycle approach, which is being co-authored with Susan Thomas;
Susan Thomas presented our work on Rethinking innovation policy in India: amplifying spillovers through contracting-out, which is being co-authored with Ajay Shah and R. A. Mashelkar; and
Charmi Mehta discussed a paper on Exploring opportunities for improving public procurement in India, authored by Karan Gulati and Anjali Sharma of TrustBridge.
Watch the full video playlist of the event here.
As part of our monthly seminar series on Indian Legal Systems Reforms, at Seminar #3, Pavithra Manivannan and Mugdha Mohapatra presented our work on Estimating adjournment rates using courts data. The event also included a presentation by Varsha Aithala of the National Law School of India University on Illuminating Judicial Productivity in India’s District Courts: An Empirical Analysis and by Lubhyathi Rangarajan on Decoding the Criminal Law Bills: A Discussion on proposed changes to the justice system.
Watch the seminar proceedings here.
VIDEOS AND PODCASTS
New episodes of Ajay Shah’s YouTube show Everything is Everything with Amit Varma are out.
Ajay Shah featured in -
Episode 347 of Amit Varma’s podcast, The Seen and the Unseen. They discuss India’s Massive Pension Crisis.
Episode 250 of The Soul Searching Podcast, where he discusses the path to building capable Indian firms and why they are important to the Indian development story.
Shortcast over Coffee in conversation with Bala Deverajan about XKDR Forum and the Indian public policy landscape.
UPCOMING
Investments for a Sustainable Tamil Nadu: Reforms and Strategies for the Power Sector
We are hosting a conference on 13th October 2023 in collaboration with TrustBridge. The sessions at the conference will present a review of the electricity sector in Tamil Nadu. To view the detailed agenda and register for the event -
We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work. Please write them to pavithra.manivannan4@gmail.com. To know more about our work and to collaborate with us visit xkdr.org.