Publications : All
Topic
Smart Grids in India: Separating Hype from Hope
Rahul Tongia discusses why Smart Grids in India have become a distinct possibility, instead of a science experiment, and why they can succeed now.
Economic & Foreign Policy Priorities for Modi’s Government
Brookings India Fellow Dr. Shamika Ravi, and Mr. R.N. Ravi, former Special Director, Intelligence Bureau of India, address questions on the economic and foreign policy priorities for the new government: How will Narendra Modi govern? Is he the right person to lead India during this challenging time in its history? Narendra Modi ...Create department of energy in PMO
The new PM should pave the way for the introduction of a bill that lays out the road map for energy independence,security and sustainability The new prime minister should immediately give a speech on energy. It should emphasise the criticality of the energy crisis and articulate the government’s intent to develop a ...Looking beyond Modi win: Experts analyze NDA’s uphill task
CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan and Latha Venkatesh caught up with some of the most influential voices in the country to get a sense of what is likely to happen as far as the economy is concerned, as far as the mood in the market is concerned and with key crucial reforms. Below is ...Three national missions on priority for the Modi government
**This column first appeared in the Business Standard, on May 19, 2014. All views are personal. Brookings India does not hold an institutional view on any subject. The mandate received by the new government gives it an opportunity to set a long-term agenda without political threats. This is exactly what any government ...Why Renewable Energy Is Harder in India than in Other Countries
Rahul Tongia discusses the challenges of renewable energy sources in India and offers recommendations to help better integrate renewables into the grid.
Why less ladies in the Lok Sabha
Gender inequality is a serious concern in most sectors but the gap between men and women has narrowed the least in political representation. Women make up merely 22% of lower houses in parliaments around the world and in India, this number is less than half at 10.8% in the outgoing Lok Sabha. ...Foreign policy: continuity, not change
On the last day of polling in India’s 16th general elections the final phase of which witnessed vicious, communal and extremely local campaigning in one corner of a single state one could be forgiven for concluding that foreign policy has no role in India’s future direction. Nothing could be further from reality. ...Time of day electricity pricing: From utilities to consumers
What is the value of saving one unit (or kilowatt-hour, kWh) of electricity? Most households would think about their bill, and then try and recall what they pay for electricity. What a large number of consumers don’t always realize is they pay a regulator-approved price that varies with their level of consumption, ...Believing in India again
It is a matter of confidence, credibility and trust. Whatever be the political hue of the next government and whoever its leader, the challenge will be to reinvigorate investor confidence in the political stewardship of the economy, restore the credibility of the executive and rebuild trust in the sanctity of policy and ...Walking the line between demographic dividend and disaster
The dominant factor that will determine whether India evolves into a middle-income nation over the next few decades is the country’s ability to generate massive numbers of jobs. As is well known, India is now in a potentially virtuous phase of its demographic transition. The working age (15-60) segment of the population ...The Concept of Strategic Balance: Relevance and Reality – An Asian...
Introduction: The concept of strategic balance was developed by the two superpowers in the context of East-West nuclear contestation during the Cold War. It was primarily inspired by the advent of nuclear weapons, though it also drew on the unique history, particularly of the two world wars and the massive destruction suffered ...The NIF Option
Over the past few months, I have written several columns about the chronic and intensifying problems in infrastructure. To my mind, two issues are of particular concern. First, there is a severe imbalance between investments across sectors, which lowers the productivity of each investment. Infrastructure is essentially a network phenomenon, a chain, ...Updating India’s nuclear doctrine
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will “study in detail India’s nuclear doctrine, and revise and update it, to make it relevant to challenges of current times.” (Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, BJP’s 2014 election manifesto). Unsurprisingly, these words have perturbed international strategic experts. Everyone remembers how the party delivered on its 1998 manifesto ...No monkey business
Why ‘right to entrepreneurship’, promised by Congress manifesto, is a bad idea. Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. ...Working Paper: Women in Party Politics
Introduction: The Women’s Reservation Bill – which proposes to reserve 33 per cent of seats in Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies for women – has been doing the rounds of the Indian Parliament in various forms since it was first introduced by the Deve Gowda government in 1996, failing each time, to ...Thirsty, hungry and sick
The second volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fifth Assessment Report was published on March 31. This volume is titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. It aggregates the current state of knowledge at both global and regional levels on how ecosystems are responding to climate change and what the larger ...Contemporary Geopolitics
Senior Fellow WPS Sidhu made presentations at The Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), as part of the teaching and research multidisciplinary project set up around the “Institut des Etudes sur la guerre et la paix,” an international Chair devoted to the study of contemporary geostrategic issues. The three lectures focused on: Nuclear Disorder ...Bang for the Buck
Capital efficiency is a critical determinant of how companies perform. Return on capital employed, which measures the surplus available to the providers of capital to the business, is a useful summary measure of this. Managements are judged by shareholders to have failed in strategy and execution when this measure declines. There are three broad sets ...Slippery Slope for Infrastructure
By now, all of us are used to global rankings of various kinds placing India close to the bottom of a large set of countries. Whether it is ease of doing business or corruption or transparency or human development or infrastructure quality, whenever a new ranking is announced, one instinctively begins searching ...Saudi Arabia, Iran and a three-way tango
If India is serious about being everyone’s ally in the Persian Gulf, it will have to engineer a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran In a deft diplomatic dance last week India simultaneously hosted Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the defence minister of Saudi Arabia, and Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister ...Realigning governance
In its essence, governance is about alignment. Multiple groups, each with its own menu of interests, some coherently articulated and others not, demand recognition and satisfaction from the government. Areas of commonality need to be found and reinforced, while differences need to be reconciled, not by the domination of one group over ...Perils of preserving the ancien régime
The old order changeth yielding place to new… (The Passing of Arthur) Despite the veracity of this maxim, existing members of the old nuclear order, which is closely intertwined with the world order even today, are challenging the inevitability of this line from Alfred Tennyson’s classic poem. In doing so, the original ...A national agenda – hopefully!
Frankly, I think we spend too much time and effort analysing the numbers presented by the interim Budget. At its core, the process simply involves obtaining parliamentary approval for the government to continue spending money on activities that are ongoing – from the routine to the priority and flagship programmes of the ...India’s Missing Women
Even though fair elections are held at regular intervals for State Assemblies and Parliament, they do not reflect the true consent of the people because a large number of women are missing from the electorate On her arrival in India recently, the words of Gloria Steinem, American feminist and leader of the ...The alpha male syndrome
Behaviour traits of primates can be positive or negative for governance The institution of the alpha male is common to several species, including virtually all primates. At any given time, one male dominates the group, which, among other things, gives him the exclusive right to reproduce. When an incumbent alpha shows signs of weakening, ...Why energy needs a big-picture view
The word “energy” is missing from the executive and legislative vocabulary. It is, of course, liberally used, and issues like “energy independence” and “energy security” are part of any official statement on economic policy. But it has not been officially defined. There is no national policy on energy endorsed or supported by ...India’s travails when peace talks fail
The spectacular failure of the Syrians on both the political and humanitarian fronts has put India’s objectives in jeopardy and reflects the perils of failed negotiations We all came out to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline, to make records with a mobile, we didn’t have much time… Deep Purple, “Smoke on ...Hearing echoes of 1914 in 2014
The spread of power centres all over the word (rather than its concentration in Europe as was the case in 1914) may prevent global war Noted Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan in a thoughtful essay titled The Rhyme of History identifies several worrying trends from the eve of the First World War in 1914, which ...BHAG inclusion BHAG
The goals for financial inclusion need to be matched by the means being used In their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994), James Collins and Jerry Porras postulated that an important characteristic of such companies was their articulation of their Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG. In contrast ...Finance and Sustainability: Regulatory and Strategic Dimensions
The 30th Annual Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Memorial Lecture CONTENTS: Introduction Sustainability Framework Sustainability and Financial Performance Regulatory and Strategic Dimensions Concluding Thoughts Good Evening. It is my great privilege to be delivering the 30th Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Memorial Lecture. I follow a long list of very eminent people, who have, by ...Energy 2030: Backgrounder
This backgrounder – prepared for the Petrotech 2014 CEO Conclave held in New Delhi, on December 17, 2013 – looks at the dynamics of energy demand and supply in 2030, the implications of geopolitical stress on energy trade, and provides a framework for a sustainable energy agenda in 2030. Key Insights: ...The state of the state
Whether the state, as an institution, is doing the right things and has the capacity to do them are fundamental questions in a liberal democracy. As India approaches the next general election, these are particularly significant questions. However, the articulation is as yet fuzzy and needs to get sharper if it is to translate into ...An evolving multilateralism
The global economy can be viewed as a rather complex balancing act between forces of integration and those of autarchy. In many domains – trade, development and macroeconomic stability are the obvious examples – the emergence of multilateral institutions as critical players in the process of integration reflects the strength of this ...Step on the gas
The government must make it easier for oil and gas companies to acquire assets abroad An important plank of India’s energy security policy is to build up a portfolio of international oil and gas assets. The government recognises that hydrocarbons are tradables and can be purchased in the open market. But given ...Slow burn
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is in the process of putting out its fifth series of assessment reports. There are three components in this series. The report on the first component – science – was released at the end of September. The other two – impacts and mitigation – will be ...Infra bottlenecks will dilute potential benefits of weak rupee: Subir...
Subir Gokarn: The earlier assessment was made at a time when the rupee had not depreciated. It is obviously showing signs of stability, importantly because of the announcement by the FED and the expectation that liquidity levels will continue to remain buoyant in the global economy. However, the depreciation over the last ...Public sector – Act V?
Act I: Idealism Beginning with the second Five-Year Plan in 1956, public enterprise was given a central role in the industrial development strategy for the economy. At that point, the perception that very large upstream investments, which would lay the foundations for comprehensive industrialisation, were best done by the state was quite ...Dimming of brand India
We have messed up the present. Can we still recover the future? We are in the midst of a severe economic crisis. Our macroeconomic indices are weakening. The first quarter growth figure has come in at 4.4 per cent and some analysts are projecting a figure for FY 2013-14 of below 4 ...Taper tribulations
When the United States Federal Reserve began what turned out to be a series of quantitative easing (QE) measures in October 2008, most observers would have seen it as a temporary crisis response measure, to be withdrawn as soon as it had done its job of calming markets and thawing out a ...“Un prêt du FMI est certainement une option” pour l’Inde
Subir Gokarn était le gouverneur adjoint de la banque centrale indienne entre 2009 et 2012. Il est aujourd’hui directeur de la recherche du groupe de réflexion Brookings India. Il évoque la crise des changes qui frappe son pays et qui s’aggrave avec l’hémorragie des capitaux. Comment analysez-vous la dépréciation de la roupie ...Fighting without fighting
A film that I still remember from my teenage years is the Bruce Lee classic, Enter the Dragon. In the film, when the group of contestants is travelling to the island for the tournament, Lee is asked by a rather aggressive competitor, Parsons, about his martial arts style. He responds that his ...A fact check on gas
How the recent gas price hike got it right. ONGC, Reliance and Cairn, the three major oil and gas producers in the country, should make an earnest effort to bring politicians, bureaucrats and other opinion-makers to their producing fields in the offshore basins of Krishna Godavari, the desert of the Barmer district ...Reflections from Binsar
Talent, money and policy must be harnessed to search for the optimal development-environment balance The tragedy in Uttarakhand cannot be overstated. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions. For me, there is a personal dimension. I have a home in the forest sanctuary of Binsar which is 40 miles north of Almora. ...