National Council of Applied Economic Research
Land policy in India has suffered from several deficits. Relative to its size, India suffers from a paucity of economic research, policy analysis, and systematic data on land, leading to well-meaning but poorly designed and implemented government programs. Land policy is defined constitutionally as the prerogative of India’s States and the focus of data and analytical efforts relating to land must also focus on the States. To help address these deficits, and with the generous support of the Omidyar Network, NCAER launched the NCAER Land Policy Initiative (NLPI) in April 2019 to build on our prior analytical work on land, our 60 plus years of experience with data collection, and our long-standing relationship of trust with governments. The objectives of the NLPI are to (1) raise official and citizen awareness of the distortions in India’s land markets and their cost to the economy; (2) produce and curate evidence and land data and to suggest solutions and state rankings that can nudge States through competitive federalism to improve their land administration, records and services; (3) where requested, pilot such solutions with States and evaluate them; and (4) help build a larger research community of analysts and experts on land issues in India. The Land Policy Initiative has been set up with two broad objectives, the creation of: (a) NCAER’s Land Records and Services Index (N-LRSI), and (b) NCAER’s Land Data Portal. While N-LRSI will create an index to capture the extent of digitization of land records and the quality of land records in Indian States and Union Territories, the Land Data Portal will be a data warehouse for all publicly available land data in India, along with N-LRSI data.
NCAER released its second Land Record and Services Index (N-LRSI) 2021, revealing that almost all States/Union Territories have shown an improvement in their efforts to digitize land records compared to the previous year. Madhya Pradesh has emerged as the top performer for the second year in a row, followed by West Bengal, Odisha, Maharashtra and Tamil... Read More
Shashanka Bhide is an Honorary Senior Adviser at NCAER. He was associated with NCAER from 1982 to 2014 in different capacities. After leaving NCAER in July 2014, he took up the position of Director, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai until his retirement in December 2018. His research has covered a number of areas in... Read More
Charu Jain is a Fellow at NCAER. Her areas of research interest includes education, gender, and socio-developmental changes. She has worked in the area of land & policy related issues, agriculture, steel, handloom sector, large-scale consumer studies, industrial surveys, housing indices, and macro-economic policy issues. Dr Jain has few national and international publications to her credit.... Read More
Sadhna Singh is working as a Research Team Assistant at NCAER.
