Archives: Event

Who owns my property? Prindex: Measuring property rights globally, what can India learn

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.

Prindex is the world’s first globally comparable measure of land and property rights. Its data for 140 countries covering 96% of the world’s adult population released in July 2020 show that almost 1 billion people around the world feel it is likely or very likely that they will lose their land or home within the next five years. The Prindex data also covers India, where some 22% of adults feel insecure about their property. Land and property rights measures can trigger a race to the top among countries and within countries for establishing systems of secure property and land rights. Such measurement can reveal the poverty-reducing potential of more secure property rights that is being wasted. And they can help build stronger constituencies for change linked to urbanisation, environmental change, poverty alleviation and women’s rights.
On October 12, NCAER hosted Malcolm Childress of the Global Land Alliance and Anna Locke of the Overseas Development Institute to share the findings of their just–released Prindex global assessment of perceived tenure security. To discuss the implications of the Prindex findings for India and the country’s own, long-standing quest for more secure property and land rights, they were joined by Jagdeesh Rao Puppala of the Foundation for Ecological Security, Pranab Ranjan Choudhury of the Center for Land Governance, and Shashanka Bhide of NCAER. Shekhar Shah, NCAER’s Director General, moderated the discussion and also introduced NCAER’s ongoing and forthcoming work on measuring the quality, accuracy, and accessibility of land records, how Indian households use them, how households perceive their property rights, and how land records and perceptions might be related. The panellists discussed how more secure property rights could help poor, land-owning rural households cope better with the economic ravages and the long-lasting scars likely from the Coronavirus pandemic in India. The discussion was  followed by a  Q&A session with the participants. The panellists also responded to write-in questions from webinar participants. The discussion was attended by over 80 participants.

Improving Learning in India’s Private Schools: How to Do It?

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.

NCAER’s Quarterly Review of the Economy, Q2:2020-21

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.

The India Policy Forum 2020

NCAER held the 17th India Policy Forum (IPF) virtually during July 13-16 2020,  a first for the conference. The IPF is organized by NCAER under the guidance of NCAER Director General Dr Shekhar Shah, who is assisted by his IPF co-editors, Dr Barry Bosworth of the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., and Professor Karthik Muralidharan, Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego.  Arvind Subramanian, former Chief Economic Adviser for India, has called the IPF “the leading economic policy event in the summer season of Delhi.”

Taking advantage of its worldwide reach, the 2020 IPF turned out also to be a truly global event, featuring a much larger audience than usual with over 200 researchers, including two Economics Nobel Prize winners, senior policymakers, and eminent panelists from India and overseas. With India in July 2020 facing massive health and economic challenges unprecedented in its history, the 17th NCAER IPF focused on high-calibre discussions around the key health and economic challenges facing the nation, all based on rigorous research by some of the best economists worldwide working on India.

While inaugurating the 17th IPF and welcoming participants, Dr Shah outlined the particular importance of the IPF in these difficult times as it brought together incisive policy research, ideas, and evidence-informed pathways to respond to the pandemic.  During the four days of the IPF 2020, over 30 authors, discussants, and chairpersons engaged on four IPF research papers and two high-level round-table discussions around the safety net, economic growth, and jobs challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic.  The IPF papers and the Policy Roundtables 1 and 2 are listed in the hyperlinked IPF programme below containing links to the IPF papers, slide presentations, and individual session videos.

The four-day event began with a felicitation for longtime IPF Advisory Panel members, MIT Professors Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics.  The felicitations were marked by deep appreciation of both their professional achievements and their personal qualities of generosity, compassion, and commitment to the cause of bettering the lives of people through research. Speakers included  Karthik Muralidharan, Pranab Bardhan, Dilip Mookherjee, Maitreesh Ghatak, and. besides Shekhar Shah, former Director Generals of NCAER Rakesh Mohan and Suman Bery. Muralidharan applauded Duflo and Banerjee for “transforming developmental economics from a theoretical field to one of cause and effect, and for ushering in change through evidence-based policy research.” Bardhan noted that the India Policy Forum was a particularly apt venue for celebrating the work of Banerjee and Duflo because “the IPF has always showcased transformative research that has consistently influenced policy”.

Professor Pronab Sen, Programme Director, International Growth Centre, India, and former Chief Statistician of India then delivered the 2nd T N Srinivasan Memorial Lecture on Data in the Times of the Coronavirus. The session was chaired by Mr Amitabh Kant, CEO NITI Aayog. In his opening remarks, Kant highlighted the need for real-time, granular data, perhaps even at the district or sub-district level in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

 While delivering the T N Srinivasan Memorial Lecture, Professor Pronab Sen’s noted that developing  countries that have low resilience and capacity to deal with crises ironically require data that permits decision-making in near real time. Cross-sectional data that most developing countries collect is not well suited to this. For this he urged governments to blend panel data sets with cross-sectional data and to use administrative data much more thoroughly and rationally. For India he urged the use of high-frequency and highly granular GST data for mapping economic activity.

The full text of his Lecture is available here.

The four IPF papers, all built around the ongoing pandemic, were presented sequentially through July 14 to 16. Details of the paper authors, chairs, and discussants are in the programme below.  Against the backdrop of the pandemic, Prachi Mishra presented her paper on the state of the economy, Ajay Shah on health policy, Barry Eichengreen, Poonam Gupta, and Rishabh Choudhary on inflation targeting, and Anirban Sanyal and Nirvikar Singh on structural change among the Indian states. Among the high-level participants, the IPF was privileged to have two former RBI Governors and one Deputy Governor, the Union Health Secretary and the Union Expenditure Secretary, the head of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Chairman and a Member of the 15th Finance Commission, and at least two former Chief Economic Advisers.

With the pandemic in the background, the IPF also hosted two policy roundtables on the lessons of the pandemic for meeting the challenges of India’s safety nets, economic growth, and employment. Details are available in the hyperlinked programme below.

The IPF Editors, Shekhar Shah, Barry Bosworth, and Karthik Muralidharan closed out the IPF 2020 on July 16th noting the considerable positive feedback they had received from the participants suggesting that this IPF was one of the best IPF in recent times despite it being the first IPF held virtually in 17 years.

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