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Release of the first edition of NCAER Land Record Services Index (N-LRSI)

NCAER, released its new Land Records and Services Index (N-LRSI 2020), on Thursday, 27th February, 2020. The N-LRSI assesses the extent of digitisation of land records and the quality of these land records in the States and UTs of India. Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Tamil Nadu emerged as the top States in the N-LRSI 2020.

The N-LRSI is an integral part of the NCAER Land Policy Initiative (NLPI) launched in 2019 with the aim of filling the gaps in economic research, policy analysis, and systematic data on land.  Access to land is a critical factor for economic growth and poverty reduction.  For government, industry, and citizens to be able to use this asset effectively and to minimise disputes, it is important to have access to reliable land and property records.  Over the years, different states have made significant progress in making their land records digitally available to citizens.  The N-LRSI aims to understand the extent of this progress and existing gaps and to identify measures to improve land records in each state.

The 2020 N-LRSI is based on data collected over 2019-20 on two aspects of the supply of land records—the extent of digitisation of land records and the quality of these land records.  The first component, which aims to assess whether a state has made all its land records digitally available to citizens, looks at three dimensions—the text of the land records (also called the record of rights), the official map associated with a land record (also called cadastral maps), and the property registration process.

The second component of the Index aims to assess if the land records are comprehensive and reliable–are ownership details updated as soon as a sale occurs, the extent of joint ownership, type of land use, land area on the record and on the map, and are encumbrances being recorded (other claims on the property such as mortgages and court cases). All these elements are closely connected to land disputes and to the ease with which transactions in land can be completed and legally recorded and then conveniently accessed.

While delivering his keynote remarks at the launch of N-LRSI 2020, Mr Ramesh Abhishek, former Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, lauded NCAER’s perceptive and insightful study on land record management in India. He said, “The N-LRSI is an excellent Reality Check on the status of land records and their accessibility in various states. This brings out the strengths and area of improvement for the government agencies and makes very practical recommendations on way forward. Central and State Governments should pay utmost attention to the findings of the Index and tailor their policies and programme accordingly.”

In his introductory remarks, Dr Shekhar Shah, Director General, NCAER, noted that “The N-LRSI is timely, pioneering work and is already attracting policymaker attention at the Central and State levels. The Index can serve at least three purposes.  First, it will help formulate State action plans to attain the goal of secure, assured land records that mirror ground realities and are generated by efficient titling services.  Second, the N-LRSI’s comparative assessment of States and UTs will make it possible for the States to learn from each other, with the best performing States showing how the supply of good, reliable, accessible digital land records has been improved.  Third, the Central Government can use the N-LRSI to reward and recognise States and UTs that perform better on the Index so that the others are encouraged to improve their standing.”

While introducing N-LRSI 2020, the project co-leader Mr Deepak Sanan, former Additional Chief Secretary (Revenue), Government of Himachal Pradesh and now NCAER Senior Advisor, observed that “the N-LRSI 2020 could not have come at a more opportune moment. The Indian economy has slowed down dramatically over 2018 and 2019. Lack of improvements in the ability to acquire and hold land, and use and transact in land and property, are major impediments inhibiting both investment and poverty reduction. India’s spectacular improvement on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index stands in marked contrast to the dismal showing with regard to the component of the Index that relates to land, the ease of registering property.”

NCAER is part of the Property Rights Research Consortium, a multi-institution research consortium supported by generous grants from the Omidyar Network India. The Property Rights Research Consortium is focusing on building research and evidence on the rights to land, housing and other assets.  The National Institution for Public Finance and Policy, the Centre for Policy Research’s Land Rights Initiative, and Brookings India are currently the other members of this network.

Speaking on why indices and research such as the N-LRSI is important, Ms Shilpa Kumar, Investment Partner, Omidyar Network India, said, “Our goal is to help leading policy organizations bring sharper focus on property and land rights, an area that is relatively under researched but very vital for individual and societal wellbeing.  Given that land and housing account for nearly 77 per cent of household assets in India, we hope that research like this can better inform more effective policy making.”

Talking about the next steps for the N-LRSI, project co-leader Professor Devendra B Gupta said, “The first round construction of the N-LRSI primarily used supply-side data during 2019-20, including proxies for measuring access for citizens, for assessing the extent of digitisation and gauging the quality of land-records services offered.  For the second round using data for 2020-21, a demand-side survey of citizens will be added to gauge the level of public awareness and satisfaction in using digital land records and associated services.”

Besides its launch today at NCAER, the N-LRSI will be featured at the upcoming 4th India Land and Development Conference 2020 (ILDC 2020) in New Delhi during March 2-4, 2020 in which the top performing states will be recognised and their performance will be discussed as a learning tool.

A previous NCAER study that focussed on assessing the extent of computerization of land records and the registration process as well as gauging the extent to which land records reflected the situation on the ground in three Indian States is available here.  

N-LRSI 2020 Findings

Scoring 60-75 points, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Tamil Nadu are the five best-performing States on the N-LRSI. West Bengal, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh are the six States in the 50-60 point category.

Figure 1 shows the different components of the N-LRSI and their weights and method of evaluation.

Figure 1: Structure of the N-LRSI


Figure 2: N-LRSI 2020 State Rankings

 

Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in India: 2011-2018

NCAER hosted  a seminar by Dr Surjit S. Bhalla, Executive Director for India, Nepal and Bhutan at the International Monetary Fund, based on his joint paper with Karan Bhasin and Arvind Virmani, “Poverty, Inequality and Growth in India: 2011/12-2017/18.” Dr Sudipto Mundle, Distinguished Senior Fellow at NCAER, was the discussant. The seminar was attended by members of the NCAER Research Team, and invited guests from various eminent institutions across Delhi.

Good quality, reliable and timely statistics are critical inputs into informed public policy formulation. There has been a growing debate regarding the quality of India’s economic statistics over the last few years. The purpose of this paper is to address some of the issues around the debate on growth and the quality of statistics. This debate has centered on the lack of robustness of national accounts data. In addition, there is a wide, and widening, divergence in the consumption estimates of NSO and the national accounts. The 2017-18 Indian NSO Consumption Expenditure Survey revealed a first-ever absolute decline in per capita consumption between 2011/12 and 2017/18.

The Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani paper estimates poverty, inequality, and growth between 2011/12 and 2017/18 by looking at all available data, including the two India Human Development Surveys collected by NCAER and Maryland, night-lights data, NSO data, and administrative data.

Surjit S. Bhalla is Executive Director for India, Nepal, and Bhutan at the IMF.  He was earlier a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and Chairman of Oxus Research & Investments in New Delhi. He is a member of NCAER’s Governing Body.  Bhalla has worked as a research economist at the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution, in the research and treasury departments of the World Bank, and as a consultant to Warburg Pincus. He has worked on Wall Street at Deutsche Bank and at Goldman Sachs. He is the author of several academic papers and books, Imagine There’s no Country (2002), Devaluing to Prosperity (2012), and The New Wealth of Nations (2017). His first book, Between the Wickets: The Who and Why of the Best in Cricket (1987), developed a model for evaluating performance in sports. Bhalla is a regular contributor to Indian newspapers, magazines, and television on financial markets, economics, politics and cricket. He is a contributing editor for the Indian Express.  Bhalla has a PhD in Economics from Princeton University, a MPA from Princeton, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

The 8th NCAER C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2020

India in a Changing World

by

David Lipton
First Deputy Managing Director, The International Monetary Fund

Dr David Lipton, First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund delivered NCAER’s 8th C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture. Held in NCAER’s new, world-class, T2 Conference Centre, the Lecture was attended by a distinguished audience including economists, civil servants, prominent media persons, industry analysts, and students.

Dr Shekhar Shah, Director-General of NCAER delivered the introductory remarks. Dr Lipton began his lecture by lauding Dr CD Deshmukh as a towering figure who, as RBI governor and later finance minister, had helped guide India’s economy through the immense challenges of independence. He also revealed that Dr Deshmukh holds a significant place in the annals of the IMF as a senior member of India’s delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the foundations of the post-war economic order. In fact, John Maynard Keynes had actually recommended Dr Deshmukh’s name for running the IMF!

Dr Lipton then outlined the various challenges and uncertainties confronting the global economy, including most recently the spread of the coronavirus epidemic that has adversely affected global value chains. He cited ‘secular stagnation’ as a major policy problem across economies, which was being reflected in other challenges like anaemic productivity growth, falling inflation, and weakening global trade. Although these problems are the legacy of the global financial crisis, they are also the new normal in a maturing, globalised world characterised by ageing societies.

In his Lecture which can be viewed here, Dr Lipton asserted that if India can address these challenges, it could “help invigorate global growth, transform global patterns of trade, and spur investment and innovation.” He argued that with the right policies—and a supportive global environment—India could become a source of “secular dynamism,” which could become the needed counterweight to the secular stagnation of the advanced economies. Highlighting that India was till recently the fastest growing large economy in the world, Dr Lipton hailed it for its potential to play an increasingly important role in the global economy, fuelled by its young and growing population and reservoir of untapped demand

Dr Lipton also touched upon the waning effect of the IT Revolution and the possible impact of innovations like big data and artificial intelligence on productivity. Reiterating India’s crucial role in this exercise, Dr Lipton pointed out that India had always worked hard to tackle its home-grown challenges of development, most significantly through reforms to produce high growth and lift millions out of poverty. Moreover, as one of the largest exporters of information, computer and telecommunications services, India has also shown the light to other countries, paving the modern path to development. Advising it to optimise its demographic dividend, Dr Lipton also averred that India needs to focus on key areas such as reviving the agricultural sector, stimulating consumer demand, especially in rural areas, accelerating export growth, and countering rising unemployment. He expressed concern at the decline in labour force participation, particularly among India women, who could prove to be a source of economic dynamism if provided the right opportunities.

Dr Lipton rounded off his lecture by recommending greater participation of India in global value chains to emerge as a hub for international manufacturing companies, and the need for other critical measures like infrastructural investments, and reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers to enable the emergence of larger and more productive manufacturers.

About David Lipton 

David Lipton is the First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, appointed initially in 2011 and then reappointed for a second term in 2016. Prior to the Fund, he was Special Assistant to President Obama, and served as Senior Director for International Economic Affairs with the National Economic Council and National Security Council at the White House. He was earlier a Managing Director at Citi and its Head of Country Risk Management.

Dr Lipton served in the Treasury Department of the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1998; as Under Secretary for International Affairs, and before that as Assistant Secretary, he helped lead the Treasury’s response to the Asian financial crisis and its effort to modernise the international financial architecture. He was earlier a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. From 1989 to 1992 he served as economic adviser to the governments of Russia, Poland, and Slovenia. For the first eight years of his professional career he was on the staff of the IMF, working on economic stabilisation in emerging market and low-income countries.

He earned his PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from Wesleyan University

About C D Deshmukh

NCAER instituted the C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture in 2013 in memory of one of India’s most eminent early economists and a founding father of NCAER. Chintaman Dwarakanath Deshmukh was the first Indian to be appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1943, was part of the official Indian delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and served as Governor of RBI until 1949. He served as the Union Finance Minister during 1950 to 1956 and was a founding member of NCAER’s first Governing Body in 1956. He later served as Chairman of the University Grants Commission and the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, during which time he also founded the India International Centre.  He was honoured by the President of India with the Padma Vibhushan in 1975. NCAER is privileged to honour the memory of C. D. Deshmukh as part of its own legacy.

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