Archives: Event

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2019 Global Microscope Report on Financial Inclusion ranks India as one of the most conducive countries for financial inclusion. This was made achievable by India’s commitment under the 2014 Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana that expands financial services to every unbanked household, especially to the poor and the underprivileged.

On December 16, NCAER’s newly established Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF) Chair Unit hosted its inaugural event for a five-part virtual workshop series on investor education and protection with financial regulators. The event was attended by more than 70 participants.

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das delivered the keynote address, articulating the government’s vision and strategy for investor education. This inaugural workshop benefitted from insights by G P Garg, Executive Director, SEBI, and Chairman, National Centre for Financial Education (NSFE), Shashank Saksena, Senior Economic Adviser at the Department of Economic Affairs and Secretary, and Secretary, Financial Stability and Development Council, and Manoj Pandey, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs and CEO, Investor Education Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA NCAER’s IEPF Chair Professor K P Krishnan shared NCAER’s proposed research program on consumer protection in finance and also chart the course for these NCAER workshops. NCAER’s Director General Shekhar Shah moderated the discussion.

India’s growth and pandemic recovery story will be paved by financial inclusion and participation in an increasingly digital financial space. With its robust digital financial services, the proportion of those with a bank account above the age of 15 in India has been reported to be nearly 80% in 2017, as compared to just about 35% in 2011. The gender gap in account ownership has also reduced to 6% (World Bank Group, The Global Findex Report, 2017). Connecting the world’s second largest population to a formal banking system is a Herculean task for this decade. Channeling savings from hard-earned money to safe and efficient channels of investment is another.

Digitization has opened up the doors of banking for hitherto untapped segments of the population. Many are accessing the formal banking system for the first time and lack trust in systems that they may not understand. Simply put, finance is an unchartered territory for many, including weaker sections and low-income groups, rural populations, and those who are new entrants into the formal labour market. On the other hand, there is an increased demand for entry into the investment market by newer populations. The past 3-5 years have seen greater equity investments from Tier 2-and-3 cities through different investment avenues. India has seen a 20% rise in demat accounts in the past six months during the pandemic, largely by those aged 24-39. This increased demand and interest in investments places an enhanced responsibility on regulatory authorities to demystify finance, encourage informed investments and channel assets into productive uses for the economy. The National Strategy for Financial Education 2020-25 recognizes the unique challenges of creating a financially aware and empowered India, and the need for convergence of efforts by multiple stakeholders that regulate and manage India’s financial resources.

The series of five NCAER workshops will cover investor education issues in securities market, insurance, pension funds and credit markets, following discussion in this inaugural workshop. These workshops will be an opportunity for participants to both learn from key regulators about their strategies for investor education and to contribute to refining the priorities for action and for further research and data collection in this area.

The next workshop in the series is scheduled for December 28, 2020, and will be chaired by SEBI full-time member, Mr G Mahalingam.

Data-driven Research & Evidence for Land Policy in India

NCAER organised its first India Land Forum 2020 (ILF 2020) during November 24-27, 2020.  Subtitled “Data-driven Research & Evidence for Land Policy in India”, the four-day, virtual ILF 2020 featured original papers on India by land researchers and NCAER’s own research based on a unique, state-wise data set that NCAER has put together in compiling the N-Land Records and Services Index released in February, 2020. The N-LRSI database is available on NCAER’s Land Portal.

The ILF 2020 was organised by the NCAER Land Policy Initiative with the aim of highlighting the gaps in economic research, policy analysis, and systematic data on land.  The keynote speech for ILF 2020 on November 24 was delivered by Professor T. Haque, Distinguished Professor at the Council for Social Development and former Chairman of NITI Aayog Special Cell on Land Policy and of the Commission of Agricultural Costs and Prices.  Setting the tone for the conference, Professor Haque noted that: “nothing could be better than when your policies are research and evidence based so that they are more acceptable to policymakers and to people at large…Absence of appropriate land policies and land management practices come in the way of land improvement, infrastructure development, as well as technological innovations.”

Earlier, in opening the ILF 2020, Dr Shekhar Shah, NCAER Director General, stated that the event is the first major airing of the work that the NCAER team has been pursuing for the past three years. The Coronavirus pandemic has heightened the need for greater attention to issues around land policy and land markets as migrants have returned home to rural areas and possibly the only asset they could fall back on.  It is important to think about how to improve land records and the ability to generate cash flows using land as collateral or through leasing.”

Ms. Shilpa Kumar, Partner at Omidyar Network India, welcomed participants and noted that “the Omidyar Network India was focusing on land and property rights with the motivation that if every Indian had secure property rights, they would be able to more meaningfully leverage the rights for their economic and social wellbeing…There has been a growth in the body of knowledge in this space and at forums like this, so the dialogue becomes all the more exciting.”

Over 4 days, the ILF 2020, had sessions on “Modernizing India’s Land Records”, “Evaluating Title Records and Property Valuation Systems in India”, “India’s Land Records Data shows Women are far behind”, “Land as Collateral for Access to Credit in India”, and “Urban Housing and Land”.  The ILF 2020 also featured two panel discussions.  The first roundtable titled “Making Land Leasing Work for Transforming Indian Agriculture” was held on November 25  and the second on November 27th  focused on the  “Experience with Innovative Technology including drones for Cadastral Mapping and Titling Programs” reviewing examples of these initiatives in India and Ukraine.

Mr Deepak Sanan, NCAER Senior Advisor and N-LPI project co-lead, noted that “Understanding issues in land is critical for realizing the potential that land holds for sustainable and equitable development.  This workshop has helped advance the goal of assisting evidence-based policy in land matters, much like our previous work on the N-LRSI, which led many states to focus even harder on improving the access to and quality of their land records.”

Talking about the importance of data-driven research, the NLPI Team Leader Professor Devendra B Gupta said, “Land is a critical asset for governments, industry, and citizens alike.  It is important to have access to reliable data relating to land and property records.  Many States in the past few years have made significant progress, especially in creating and updating digital data repositories for their land records.  This pace has to accelerate, and we can help that process with discussions of the type we have had at ILF 2020.”

The ILF 2020 ended on Friday, November 27th with a concluding address by Dr K.P. Krishnan, IEPF Chair Professor at NCAER and former Additional Secretary, Department of Land Resources.  Krishnan noted that “the ILF had touched upon all five aspects of land policy in India that I have considered important for quite some time.  First, the question of the state vs the market in land policy and transactions; second, state capacity for handling land matters;  third, technological advances and their impact; fourth, legal and regulatory changes in the field; and fifth, questions of Centre vs State in making progress on land policy and property rights. ILF 2020 has provided discussion space and data and evidence sharing in all these areas in some measure or the other.” Over 100 participants attended the virtual conference on all four days.

As The Economist magazine of September 12, 2020 noted, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto made the startling observation 20 years ago that people in poor countries are not as poor as they seem. They have assets—lots of them—but they cannot prove that they own them, so they cannot use them as collateral. A legal document is worth little if its owner cannot easily use it. If poor people had clear, legal title to their property, they could borrow more easily to buy better seeds or start a business. Or send their children to a better school. Or cope with a pandemic. They could invest in their land—by irrigating it or erecting a shop—without fear that someone might one day grab it. As The Economist noted, property rights can make the poor richer.

Nearly half of India’s school-going children, some 120 million, attend private schools. Private schooling dominates how urban India learns, and it is making steady inroads into rural India. Contrary to popular belief, private schools don’t just cater to the elite. A tsunami of demand from low- and middle-income families across the country has resulted in 45% of private school students paying less than Rs 500 in monthly fees. But the returns to this massive growth in private schooling are likely to be low.

Learning outcomes in private schools need urgent attention. Annual Status of Education Report 2018 shows that 35% of rural private school students in Standard 5 cannot read a basic, Standard 2 level text.  Learning outcomes are under regulated, and school entry, salaries, and infrastructure are over regulated: often the private school regulator also manages government schools, leading to conflicted regulatory incentives. The Coronavirus pandemic has affected the dominant, low-fee private schools the most, forcing them to close or to adapt to new teaching methods for which they are unprepared. This will further jeopardise learning outcomes in private schools.

India’s new National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) recognises the strong need for reforming India’s private schools to improve learning outcomes. The Central Square Foundation (CSF), in partnership with Omidyar Network India, recently released a State of the Sector Report on Private Schools in India, which the NEP 2020 cites. Against these two reports, how can we move forward?

On Tuesday, October 6, NCAER and CSF hosted Ashish Dhawan, Founder and Chairman, CSF, to present the CSF Report’s main findings. The webinar  started with keynote remarks by Anil Swarup, Founding Chairman, Nexus of Good, and Former Secretary of School Education, who will frame the issues. Following Dhawan, a distinguished panel of Karthik Muralidharan, NCAER Non-Resident Senior Fellow and Tata Chancellor’s Professor, University of California, San Diego, and Farzana Afridi, Associate Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, joined the discussion about the pathways to private school reform in India. The session was moderated by NCAER Director General Shekhar Shah. A  Q&A session with the participants followed and the panellists also responded to write-in questions from webinar participants. The discussion was attended by over 120 participants.

A Press Release about the event is available on this webpage.

As India’s Covid-19 case count crosses five-million and its daily new positive cases came close to a lakh on September 11, the virus is deepening its impact on the daily lives of people and on the economy. India’s cumulative caseload has now become the world’s second-largest. At the same time, many feel that there is no choice but to prioritise reopening the economy and accept the risk of surging infections.

The economy remains in an unprecedented crisis. NCAER’s Quarterly Review of the Economy (QRE) in May 2020, and again in a June QRE Update, had suggested a base case GDP contraction of 26% for Q1:2020-21, as it turns out, close to the official estimate released last month of a 24% GDP decline during the first quarter.

Where will the Indian economy go from here? How will it perform during the rest of this financial year, over the next year, and then over the medium and long term? These difficult questions run alongside deep concerns about how macroeconomic policy–both its fiscal and monetary components–will find its way between the conflicting policy goals of stimulating an economic recovery and containing inflation, which, except for March 2020, has remained above RBI’s target rate of 6% since December 2019.

On Friday, September 25, the NCAER macroeconomic team addressed these difficult questions in presenting NCAER’s Quarterly Review of the Economy for Q2:2020-21. The QRE’s principal authors, NCAER Distinguished Fellow Sudipto Mundle, Senior Fellow Bornali Bhandari, and Assistant Professor, NIPFP, Rudrani Bhattacharya, presented their findings and were in conversation with the distinguished QRE guests, Ashima Goyal and Pranjul Bhandari. Dr Ashima Goyal is a part-time member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and Professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research. Ms Pranjul Bhandari is the Chief India Economist at HSBC Securities & Capital Markets (India) Private Limited. The discussion was moderated by NCAER Director General, Shekhar Shah. The webinar was attended by over 100 participants.

The Review and presentation is available on this webpage.