Rajesh Chadha, Ganesh Sivamani and Karthik Bansal provide an overview of India’s historical, current, and proposed exploration policies, good international practices, issues with the existing system, and recommendations for creating a globally-competitive exploration regime.

Renu Kohli's Discussion Note discusses three significant reasons why the observed tax buoyancy in the recovery year, FY23, must be interpreted with caution.

This Discussion Note explores India’s mineral royalty rates, which are among the highest in the world, thus impacting the competitiveness of the mining sector.

The study by Rahul Tongia focuses on ways to encourage the energy transition for developing countries where high costs of capital are a factor in keeping a spread between fossil fuel technologies and non-carbon solutions.

What is the import-export trade dynamics of mineable minerals in India, especially after the Atma-Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan? Read the new discussion note by Rajesh Chadha and Ishita Kapoor to know more.

Aashita Dawer's study aims at analysing Judicial efficiency for Supreme Court, high courts and subordinate courts of India. The study uses various regression techniques while highlighting the importance of effective justice delivery.

Comparing expenditure on Solid Waste Management (SWM) and cleanliness performance for 11 municipalities in India, Shishir Gupta and Rishita Sachdeva find out that there is no systematicity between increase in expenditure and improved performance.

Rajesh Chadha and Ishita Kapoor analyse the collection, allocation, and expenditure patterns in India’s top 12 mining states through a DMF Utilisation Index (DMFUI).

While the expansion of mining activities may benefit the affected local communities, it may harm them if their benefits do not offset the negative impact on their habitat and earnings.

The progress on several indicators since the 2014-15 survey points to the success of interventions on various fronts, although a cross-year comparison reveals that progress has slowed down for many states.

The changes being proposed by the government for delicensing distribution and allowing multiple discoms in the same geographical area are unlikely to solve the problems in the power sector, particularly regarding the poor financial health of discoms.

India needs to undertake serious research and build a policy framework of being self-reliant in clean energy and high-tech equipment by acting fast on exploring and excavating critical minerals and setting up investments in the downstream value chain of requisite manufacturing equipment at home.

This discussion note argues that India needs to benchmark its fiscal architecture to 21st century international standards.

This discussion note suggests an integrated approach to addressing the retirement of older coal plants, installation of ECS, etc,.

The mining royalty rates in India are among the highest in the world. This discussion note takes a view of the various systems of mineral royalty and their implementation for different minerals in India over time and compares it with the systems implemented on other mining jurisdictions.

Introduction While there is rich extant literature on India’s dependence on and its long-term need for natural gas and coal, there is not a similar understanding of non-fuel minerals, particularly the critical minerals. A study by the Department of Science and Technology and the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (DST-CEEW, 2016) ...

Few would dispute that change is required in the legislative and regulatory framework of the power sector in India.

The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act of 1957 regulates the mining sector in India, including specifying the rules for the allocation of mining leases. The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2015 introduced, amongst other changes, the system of auctions to be used by state governments when granting ...

COVID has unleashed a relatively unique global pandemic with economic, human, and institutional upheavals that haven’t been seen in generations. Economies are in a tailspin, and employment has been one of the biggest casualties beyond direct human health. The collapse of both liquidity and economic activity hits DisComs harder than many other ...

I. Economic Growth and Trade Covid-19 has hit the world hard. As on May 11, 2020, there have been a total of 4,215,274 positive cases across the world with 284,672 reported deaths. The U.S. has suffered the highest number of 80,800 deaths. India has reported 67,724 Covid-19 positive cases and 2,215 deaths.[1] ...

These steps can make India's mineral asset allocation process more transparent and create a competitive exploration environment.

The India Input-Output Transactions Table for 2015-16 depicts intersectoral intermediate transactions across 131 sectors of the economy as well as the final demand for consumption and investment, and international trade flows.

India's mining sector can be a catalyst for the growth and development of the manufacturing sector and the economy as a whole.

The Indian power sector value chain can be broadly segmented into generation, transmission, and distribution sectors. At an all-India level, the total installed generation capacity was 3,56,100.19 MW as on March 31, 2019 (provisional). The peak load demand of 1,75,528 MW during FY 2018-19 was largely met, considering that the peak load supply shortfall ...

Brookings India launched the Electricity and Carbon Tracker, a first-of-its-kind near real-time tracker of electricity generation by type of source as well as electricity carbon emissions at an all-India level. With high resolution data, we can now do a Time of Day (ToD) level analysis of India’s power generation system. The tracker ...

The year 2018 has brought about a new set of draft/proposed Amendments to the Electricity Act 2003 (EA2003), which are an extension to the draft amendments introduced in Lok Sabha in 2014 but did not pass. EA2003 is the central act governing the power sector structure and policy in India, and any ...

More energy and power sector data is available in India than ever before, especially through a combination of websites and portals. We propose that issues in locating, procuring and acquiring data be ironed out for researchers and practitioners to conduct more evidence-based policy research and contribute to the national discourse. Researchers use ...

Among the growing network of trilateral discussions involving India and other countries, one that has received relatively little attention is the dialogue involving India, Indonesia, and Australia. The three countries held their first senior officials’ trilateral dialogue in November 2017 in Indonesia. To discuss this new trilateral, Brookings India and the Perth ...

President Donald Trump has unleashed a wave of tariffs over the past year against many of its largest trading partners including China, Canada, the European Union, and Mexico. India too has been affected, particularly by tariffs on steel and aluminium. The rest of the world now confronts choices about how best to ...

On August 30 and 31, Nepal will host the fourth BIMSTEC Summit in Kathmandu with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other heads of government expected to attend the summit. Founded in 1997, the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) includes Bangladesh, Bhutan,India, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, but has often struggled ...

Brookings India hosted an expert roundtable discussion with Bruce Jones, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., on the changing nature of the international order and the United States’ role. While the discussion was under the Chatham House Rule, and therefore was not for ...

Notions of being prosperous and developed are changing around the world. The concepts of Gross National Happiness and United Nations’ World Happiness Report are gradually gaining momentum. In his February 2018 budget speech, Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also outlined his government’s priority on ensuring ‘ease of living’. New Zealand is at ...

On May 21, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Russian President Vladimir Putin for an informal summit in Sochi, where the two leaders upgraded this traditionally close relationship to a “special privileged strategic partnership.” Despite this announcement, developments in West Asia, Afghanistan, and bilateral defence ties between India and Russia have raised questions ...

The last two years have seen a considerable widening of differences between China and India over issues such as the boundary dispute, the Belt and Road Initiative, Indian membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and China’s presence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Amid these developments, Indian Prime Minister Narendra ...

In his book “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World”,  Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid argues that Islam is exceptional in how it relates to law, governance and politics, and plays an outsized role in public life in the Arab world. He also posits that the hope ...

The concept of the Indo-Pacific has been in existence for several years now, although it has recently gained renewed traction. An understanding of the Indian and Pacific Oceans forming a common strategic space underpins this concept. It therefore emphasizes the maritime dimension of security in the region. It also implicitly elevates the ...

Data is becoming more and more important for all spheres of public and private activity.  The power sector is no different, but much of data has been for operational reasons, ranging from billing to power management to operations. With the rise of IT (and eventually, the Internet of Things), data is now ...

Growing Renewable Energy (RE) means a greater increase in variability of supply, a relatively newer phenomenon for grids where demand was the usual variable, and supply was tightly controlled, or ‘despatchable’. One cannot control the wind or sun, but one at least needs to predict it well, so that the rest of ...