A new policy brief from the Task Force on Climate, Development and the IMF seeks to improve the RST’s design by taking stock of the early experiences of RST programs.

This Policy Brief explores how India has transformed into a positive force on the global stage, achieving domestic climate targets and spearheading innovative approaches in climate diplomacy.

This Policy Brief by Rakesh Mohan discusses the need for a system view to address a host of road safety issues through research and development.

This policy brief synthesises insights, relating to key challenges faced in achieving UHC, from six emerging country case studies—Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, and Turkey—with varying contexts in their journey towards UHC.

Rajesh Chadha and Ganesh Sivamani's study results point to policy recommendations for ensuring uninterrupted supplies of critical minerals through enhanced domestic mineral exploration and extraction, along with assured sources elsewhere.

The Model Tenancy Act can improve rent control legislation and contract enforcement to bring vacant houses into the market.

India must improve collaboration with neighbours and leverage regional institutions for disaster management.

Introduction Tourism is an important metric of a country’s soft power potential, marked by an increase in movement of people and enabling people-to-people connectivity. Over the last two decades, South Asia has emerged as an attractive tourist destination due to its natural and cultural diversity, and price competitiveness.[2] The region is home ...

Introduction Despite geographical proximity and the existence of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), South Asia is one of the least economically integrated regions in the world. Owing to protectionist policies, high logistics cost, lack of political will and a broader trust deficit, intra-regional trade in South Asia remains well below ...

Introduction India has long been an education hub for students from its neighbourhood.[2] Besides economic benefits, India’s capacity to attract students from neighbouring countries has helped it to form closer political ties and spread its cultural influence and values to the surrounding region. India’s ability to provide quality higher education is a ...

Marked by a history of political divisions, economic differences, and geostrategic divergences, the Indian subcontinent remains deeply divided, with exceptionally low levels of integration. No other regional power is as disconnected from its immediate neighbourhood as India. Recognising this disconnect as a challenge to India’s economic and security interests, Prime Minister Narendra ...

Inherent and structural differences mean simply breaking up CIL will not unleash meaningful competition, not unless the system is willing to bear a high spread in coal prices. Location matters enormously, and coal ends up being a not very liquid commodity (no pun intended). Newspaper reports have spoken about breaking up Coal ...

China today looms large in India’s consciousness, with implications for India’s neighbourhood and connectivity initiatives, trade policy, and incoming investment. The next government will need to focus on certain priorities. Improve Aid Delivery Offering a credible alternative to the deepening Chinese economic presence in the neighbourhood remains a pressing challenge. While India ...

The South Asian neighbourhood has become a new foreign policy priority in recent years, mostly in reaction to China’s expanding footprint. In 2014, New Delhi shifted gears with its “Neighbourhood First” policy and focused more on the region than most preceding governments. However, these efforts were far too late and too little ...

The next Indian government faces a world that looks very different from the way it did five – and certainly 10 or 20 – years ago. The global economy is facing headwinds: stagnant trade, disruptive technologies, and growing protectionism concerning agricultural and manufactured goods, key services, technology transfers, and labour mobility. U.S. ...

If we wish to secure the continued transformation of India, we must be prepared for the new situation and threats that we face. At a minimum, that requires urgent defence reform, foreign policy reform, and the reform of our security structures and practices. Update National Security Structures We have had twenty years ...

Executive Summary The policy literature on democracy often overlooks a number of factors that have important implications for democracy’s future. First, it frequently exaggerates the decline of democracy globally, often by conflating reverses in liberalism with reversals in democracy. Second, it continues to imply ownership of democracy by the Western world when ...

Comparing Renewable Energy and Coal A number of publications proclaim Renewable Energy (RE) is cheaper than coal. A newspaper will often show two cost curves, a rising one for coal, and a falling one for RE, especially solar (Figure 1). At some point they cross-over, an intersection dubbed “grid parity”. It’s a ...

The visit of the Indian Prime Minister to Washington DC provides an opportunity for the US and India to set aside some of the uncertainties that have set into the relationship. President Trump and Prime Minister Modi must be ambitious and spell out a vision befitting a global partnership. Narendra Modi’s visit ...

After years of a ‘Look East’ policy that recognised the importance of the Asia-Pacific region for Indian interests, the Indian government decided to upgrade it rhetorically to ‘Act East’. The objective of the ‘Act East’ policy is to ensure a multipolar Asia, through deeper institutional engagement, land and maritime connectivity, and security ...

It is undeniable that the nature of military force in international affairs has changed in the seven decades since India’s Independence. It has been almost 45 years since India fought a major conventional war, and events since – including the experience of India’s counter-insurgency in Sri Lanka, its development of nuclear weapons, ...

Notwithstanding the sizeable economic and social gains made by India over the last two decades, the pernicious, often invisible, challenge of maternal and child undernutrition remains a national public health concern. This undermines the assumption that economic growth is in itself a sufficient condition for improvement in public health. India is home ...

In the foreign policy arena the biggest accomplishment of the Narendra Modi government has doubtless been the evolution of relations with the United States. During his first year Prime Minister Modi has almost single-handedly repaired, revived, revitalized, and re-energized relations with the United States from one that was either hopelessly adrift or, ...

While Mr. Modi’s foreign policy objectives are the same as his predecessor, what has changed is the implementation and operationalization of these objectives. During the hustings last year foreign policy was barely mentioned in Narendra Modi’s campaign. However a year after his stunning victory, which gave India its first majority government in ...

While Mr. Modi’s personal world view and its effect on India’s foreign policy is difficult to discern, India has considerable potential to establish itself as a more influential player on the world stage. In order to prioritise India’s contribution to developing international regimes related to climate, cyber, energy, food, outer space, trade, ...

After the November 2014 joint U.S.-China announcement on climate change, all eyes turned towards India. What would India do? Would it sign a similar agreement, especially with the impending visit by President Barack Obama? Even if some agreement were signed, what would India promise? Probably one of the best outcomes of the ...

U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation, starting with the July 18, 2005 nuclear agreement and culminating in the formal 123-agreement bill approved by the U.S. Congress on September 28, 2008, was expected not only to become a springboard for extensive bilateral nuclear cooperation, including the sale of U.S. reactors to support India’s ambitious nuclear ...

The Pre-Summit Backdrop Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) have been among the most contentious economic issues in the bilateral relationship between India and the United States. For several years, the U.S. has claimed that the Indian regulatory regime has been both weak and inadequately enforced. In a number of IPR domains, the contention ...

There was a time when India-U.S. relations were summed up in platitudes like “world’s largest democracies,” while seasoned pundits lamented that they were in fact “estranged democracies” that had very little in common. Today, with nearly 30 separate dialogues, the India-U.S. agenda involves issues ranging from the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) to the ...

The U.S. is the second largest energy consumer in the world, and India is soon to become the third. The U.S. already has a large consumption base; India has enormous growth ahead of it given the low per capita levels of energy consumption (an order of magnitude lower than the U.S.). This ...

Over the last 20 years, we have witnessed an explosion of aspiration among the Indian youth, who are also among the biggest supporters of Prime Minister Modi. Access to quality higher education is the launchpad for the realization of those aspirations and dreams of young India. College and university education, however, remain ...

India-U.S. civil nuclear cooperation, starting with the July 2005 nuclear agreement and culminating in the formal 123-agreement bill approved by the U.S. Congress and signed into law in the autumn of 2008, was the poster boy of bilateral relations; it was expected to mark an end to decades-old strategic mistrust between the ...

There is broad consensus in India that the country’s single most important objective is to become the world’s third largest economy by 2025 and, concurrently, also emerge as one of the key global political and security actors in the evolving multipolar world. As a corollary, there is growing appreciation that India’s foreign ...