XKDR Newsletter - Issue 33
Medicines procurement • Financial inclusion through Aadhaar • India-US Free Trade • Free healthcare • JuliaSphere • IBC workshop • 15th Emerging Markets Conference and more.
Improving supply chain management of medicines for public healthcare in India
Healthcare in India has a large public sector presence. But there is a problem of lack of certainty in the availability of medicines in the public healthcare system. In their new paper, Pavithra Manivannan, Charmi Mehta and Susan Thomas argue that this problem can be resolved by building better public procurement processes.
The authors examine the procurement processes in two cases - medicine procurement by the Tamil Nadu State Medical Corporation, and under the national anti-tuberculosis scheme - to identify common features that may enable timely supply of medicines in the public healthcare system.
Key findings:
A robust information system to track stocks and flows of medicines, both in and out, within the network of public healthcare institutions.
Processes and manuals covering functions across the full pipeline of the procurement contract and investments in regular training to equip the personnel to carry out each function. This includes demand assessment, inventory management, quality checks and penalising defaults.
Guidelines on managing procurement contracting and budgeting during emergencies and crises.
Knowledge management of the network of eligible vendors and feedback on their contract performance.
Delivery to the end user as the organisational mandate of the procuring entity.
Read the full paper here.
Economic Development and Digital Transformation: Learning from the experience of Aadhaar and Financial Inclusion in India
The digital public infrastructure (DPI) approach has gained prominence in digital transformation, with India’s Aadhaar often cited as a success story for accelerating financial inclusion. This paper by Suyash Rai critically evaluates India’s progress on financial inclusion from 2011 to 2021, revealing a paradox: while account ownership surged, account usage remained low. The paper explores whether alternative policy designs could have balanced electoral and economic goals more effectively.
The paper’s suggestions include room for greater political creativity in defining the policy objectives, liberalising regulations, liberalisation to enhance financial inclusion, and leveraging the public sector banks.
Read the full paper here.
OP-ED & COMMENTARY
In his column for the Business Standard, Ajay Shah writes on
The tortoise and the hare. Most people think of economic growth as something that happens (on average) for a long time. However, this intuition is based on first-world countries like the US and the UK. He suggests that if these countries are analogous to the tortoise, India would be better represented by the hare, with sudden spurts of growth periods. As business horizons are about three to seven years, firms need to think strategically about the longer-term to understand how to plan around such growth, which is usually not monocausal. Considering the current remarkable global environment, he questions whether the tortoise might falter, and how that would affect India’s planning for the next growth episode.
Envisioning an India-US free trade agreement. India is a small player in global merchandise trade. Drawing on Daniel Rothschild’s talk at the Emerging Markets Conference 2024, he discusses three groups that would support Indo-US FTA - philosophical supporters of FTA, big business interests, and American China-hawks. He lays out what the contours of such an FTA could look like, and ends with the note that successful negotiations require strong state capability.
VIDEOS AND PODCASTS
New episodes of XKDR’s YouTube series Big Ideas - conversations with some of the leading thinkers of today - are out:
Road to universal free healthcare in India, with Murali Neelakantan: Ep 33
Build Capabilities Not Ambitious Policies, with Lant Pritchett: Ep 34
Comprehensive National Power of India, with Gautam Bambawale: Ep 35
New episodes of Ajay Shah’s YouTube show Everything is Everything with Amit Varma are out:
A History of Hinduism, Ep 76
Objects From Our Past, Ep 77
The Case for Nuclear Electricity, Ep 78
MORE Stories That Should be Films, Ep 79
EVENTS
JuliaSphere NCR
We hosted the first JuliaSphere session in NCR - a full-day workshop dedicated to Julia, the programming language. Topics included fundamentals, data structures, statistics, machine learning, and satellite imagery analysis. The speakers from XKDR Forum were Ajay Shah, Susan Thomas, and Ayush Patnaik. Other speakers at the workshop included Viral Shah from JuliaHub, co-founder of the language.
Emerging Markets Conference 2023
We co-hosted the 15th edition of the Emerging Markets Conference in December 2024.
Over 4 days of the event, we had a variety of sessions spanning geopolitics, firms, banks, macro-economic activity, legal system reforms, the administrative state, and public finance.
Pre-conference workshop on “Insolvency and Bankruptcy Reforms in India: 10 years after the IBC”
We hosted this workshop pre-EMC to step back and take a look at the changes that have occurred in the decade that the IBC has been operational. Paper presentations and panels brought up topics such as the requirement of sector specificity in the law, what the insolvency process looks like for different stakeholders like MSMEs and personal guarantors, reforms through the lenses of firms’ access to credit or audit fees, and how to improve the speed of the process.
Presentations
Diya Uday spoke at the India Management Research Conference (IMRC) 2024 as a panelist at the Entrepreneurship Track, and presented research on the effectiveness of India’s start-up policies, with a particular focus on tax exemptions and intellectual property rights (IPR) support.
Upcoming
We are hosting Seminar #12 of the Indian Legal System Reform series in February 2025. This seminar series brings together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, civil society members, and other stakeholders to discuss, debate, and explore potential improvements for a better legal system and policy pathways for effective implementation.
The recordings of our previous seminars are here. To participate as a speaker or to attend, please write to us.
XKDR Forum is an interdisciplinary research and policy organisation harnessing knowledge and capabilities across diverse fields of economics, law, public administration, engineering, statistics and science. We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work.