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Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a crucial intervention because of its long‐term impact on child development. However, information concerning the effectiveness of the ECEC in developing countries like India is sparsely available. This empirical study drew upon primary data collected from India's eastern state, West Bengal and investigated whether attending preschool contributed to children's cognitive and social skill development. The study found that attending preschool did not provide dividends in the form of cognitive and social skill accumulation. Furthermore, attending private preschool was associated with socioemotional development but no cognitive development. Moreover, parents' education seems to be a strong predictor for child's development. Given the findings of this paper, preschools in India, both in the public and private sectors, would need considerable quality improvement to deliver developmentally appropriate ECEC to children. It is particularly relevant in the context of the new National Education Policy in India, which emphasises the need to provide universal access to high‐quality ECCE to all young children across the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to examine the ability of a global fear index (GFI) based on the COVID‐19 pandemic and government policy responses as a measure of uncertainty in predicting eight Indian rupee‐based exchange rate return series: the Australian dollar, the Canadian dollar, the Swiss franc, the US dollar, the euro, the British pound sterling, the New Zealand dollar, and the Japanese yen. The predictability of the daily Indian rupee‐based exchange rate return series is tested using the recently developed wild bootstrap likelihood ratio test of Kim and Shamsuddin for the period 2 October 2020 to 8 March 2021. Both symmetric and asymmetric tests revealed GFI as an insignificant determinant of the Indian rupee‐based exchange rate return series. However, government policy responses are a significant determinant of the rupee–dollar exchange rate return series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of forest restoration in India. While contemporary literature often emphasizes the novelty of forest restoration programmes as exemplified in large‐scale global pledges such as the Bonn Challenge or the Trillion Trees initiative, we show that forest restoration has thousands of years of history in India. Furthermore, this history plays an important role in shaping current restoration efforts, in ways that often undermine restoration goals. We find four themes in this history: the definitions of forests changed as the national administration metamorphosed, the philosophy behind the afforestation practices transitioned from commercial to a focus on forest cover that still underemphasizes ecological and subsistence values of forests, the involvement of forest‐dependent people in forest restoration has been limited by government policies through much of this period, and current restoration practice draws more from the history of commercial timber production than from contemporary restoration science. Drawing on these insights, we argue that restoration programmes need to be reconsidered in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims This paper seeks to provide a historical overview of gambling and contemporary anti-gambling legislation in India. Methods Based on a review of available literature, including historical sources, publications in the lay press and internet sources, this paper draws together evidence to present a synopsis of gambling and anti-gambling measures from antiquity to present times. Results Gambling is a popular pastime and has been a ubiquitous part of daily life from antiquity until the present. Archaic laws, framed in the 19th century, still regulate gambling in India, with a formal ban on most forms of gambling. This has created a huge illegal gambling market, with its attendant problems. Recent developments, including an explosion of sports betting operations (especially in cricket) and internet betting sites, are challenging the status quo and leading to calls for legalizing gambling. Concern for the consequences of pathological/ problem gambling is conspicuous by its absence in popular discourse and academic research. Conclusions Despite the importance and longevity of the practice of gambling in the daily life of India, and the opposition to it, due to the potential for individual and societal harm there is a surprising lack of contemporary curiosity and scholarly literature on pathological gambling from the region. The prohibitions against gambling are being increasingly challenged to change to a system of legalized gambling. To inform and guide public policy and future legislation, there is a serious need to initiate rational, scientific enquiries into the nature and impact of gambling in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing rates of school enrolment have changed childhoods in the global South, so that it is now the norm for children to attend at least some years of primary school. This paper explores the extent to which valuing of children as educational projects and outcomes may be displacing previous valuations of children as contributors to the domestic economy. The paper draws on qualitative interview data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of children growing up in four developing countries, using a case study approach to explore the experiences of four children in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper suggests that children are balancing expectations for the future with responsibilities to their families in the present, and concludes that the over-valuing of formal qualifications and the under-valuing of forms of work such as agriculture risk being internalised by children, leaving those who do not succeed feeling they are 'a waste'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background India had around 158 million children under the age of 6 and about 26 million births in 2015. In the same year, India's Integrated Child Development Services Scheme served about 82 million children under 6 years and over 19 million pregnant women and lactating mothers. These 102 million beneficiaries received services in about 1.3 million centres. Method This paper reviews the growth of the Scheme and considers challenges to scaling up quality with equity based on results of large-scale national or multistate studies. Results The Scheme is associated with decreased malnutrition and better child development. The size and diversity of the country, the policy context, funding mode and lack of community awareness and engagement have hindered scaling up access while the approach to service delivery, low institutional capacity and poor infrastructure have impeded scaling up of implementation quality. Conclusions This review illustrates the challenges associated with scaling-up access and implementation quality of a multicomponent, integrated early childhood programme in a large, diverse country. The future success of the Integrated Child Development Services will depend on how well it adheres to quality standards and how well it evolves to address current weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of programmes have recently been initiated to popularise the use of sanitary pads among poor women in developing countries. In this light, we review the prevailing menstrual practices in different contexts across India, as well as the initiatives undertaken to improve sanitary care. We also report findings from a study amongst women in slums of Hyderabad. We find high usage of sanitary pads (56 to 64 percent), suggesting that development initiatives have percolated down to the urban poor. Furthermore, we find that although a large number of cloth users (57 percent) are willing to change practice, an overwhelming number of them (94 percent) elicit a preference for re-usable cloth pads. This suggests a disengagement with public policy discourses on menstrual care that have so far focused singularly on promotion of sanitary pads. We draw upon these results to comment on better sanitary care for women slum dwellers in a rapidly urbanising context. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to identify some promising policy options which could be part of a strategic and holistic effort to address India's future water challenges. Significant increases in agricultural water productivity would be a major factor in reducing the need for developing new water sources. Crop diversification, appropriately targeted to account for the present agricultural systems and available water resources, will increase productivity. Furthermore, much more emphasis needs to be placed on effective management of the groundwater resources through renewed efforts to enhance artificial recharge and conservation. Also, efforts should be revived to improve the existing surface irrigation systems. In particular, systems could be reconfigured to provide a more reliable water supply and allow effective community level management, where appropriate. Finally, while some of the increasing demands from domestic and industrial users will be met by the development of groundwater and reallocation of water from the agricultural sector, this will not be sufficient. Given that such conditions are emerging in states with high economic growth and relatively water scarce basins, this will require the further development of water resources. In some cases, these conditions along with the demand for reliable water for high value crops, will be part of the justification for inter-basin transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a broad strategic assessment of the experience of rural industrialization in India. It does so from a policy perspective with the aim eventually of highlighting specific outstanding policy issues. Rural and small-scale industrialization (RSSI) has held a special place in Indian development thinking and policy formulation from the outset. This privileged position, however, does not derive from a universal consensus with regard to the rationale and policy framework applicable to this sub-sector. However, such has been the symbolic power and populist appeal of RSSI that it has retained its special status within diverse strategic and ideological frameworks. But how has the sub-sector performed? Is the infant industry still in need of paternalistic protection at the age of fifty? Are there any credible indications of a strategic break with longstanding policy frameworks inherited from the past? Can any crucial policy gaps be identified? How well does rural small-scale industry satisfy the extensive developmental claims made by its proponents? These are the general questions addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investments in Indian Medical Tourism (MT) have been growing at a greater rate than the global standards. However, unfortunately, Indian legislations have not managed to keep pace with this phenomenal growth, and have thereby been lacking in forming specific amendments, coupled with both preventive and compensative decrees. Moreover, safety and security have emerged as an aggregated inter‐web of complex multi‐dimensional components, encompassing aspects such as "public and personal data safety," "legal protection of tourists," "consumers" "protection," and so on. The internet has affected "data integration," "storage," "exchange" exposing thereby the possibilities of security breaches. All of these, in amalgamation, call for elevating the overall hygiene of India's growing medical tourism industry. Based upon this backdrop, this study looks into the theories of security, privacy, and consumerism, and the need for preventive cybercrime laws in India's medical tourism sector, especially considering several technical vulnerabilities that do exist. In this endeavor, I reviewed and analyzed journals and government policies, and have looked to identify some of the fallacies and gaps. Additionally, I also attempted to identify some of the needs that exist in MT's cybersecurity space, both within the Indian and international contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusive growth is the new popular slogan animating development initiatives across the globe. Embracing the common rhetoric of rights discourses, the Indian government is investing heavily in novel welfare schemes for empowering poor people on the assumption that granting them access to the official market will put them on track for upward mobility and economic progress. In this article I use a case study of a massive slum relocation scheme in the Indian capital of Delhi to challenge this presumption. Resettlement is promoted as a way to accommodate the poor in the legal city. While it makes available desired commodities, its implementation is a complex process of renegotiating the divide between licit/illicit forms of urban habitation. Importantly, the bureaucratic procedures that create legal entitlements depend on the illicit, informal, and illegal domain that they aim to supplant. Thus, the new official suburbs emerge through the activity of people who flout the rules to meet the government target. Rather than a categorical shift from illegal to legal inhabitants of the city, resettlement re-creates urban citizenship as a form of tolerated encroachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The classical economic development literature argues that growth is accompanied by a reduction in agriculture's share and an increase in nonagriculture's share of employment. Yet growth of the nonfarm sector does not necessarily signal increasing levels of development, as the sector may serve as subsistence employment for many individuals. This ambiguity is heightened by a surprising lack of microevidence regarding sectoral and occupational choice and, especially, how government policies impact these decisions. In this article, I make a simple observation regarding how nonfarm self‐employment reacts to market conditions: households and individuals that enter into nonfarm self‐employment for subsistence reasons are more likely to exit the sector when wages increase or when more stable employment becomes available. With this assumption as a starting point, I examine the effects of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which increased prevailing wages in rural India. The program significantly decreases days spent in nonfarm self‐employment. In addition, the implied labor elasticity is three times higher than economy‐wide estimates, suggesting rural nonfarm self‐employment is a sector of last resort for many individuals. Additional analyses suggest this impact is driven primarily by two mechanisms: higher wages and alternative options for risk‐management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identifies and assesses the perspectives of four key stakeholder groups towards solar minigrids in rural India. The stakeholders considered are policymakers, minigrid developers and operators, development organizations, and national grid representatives. Recent state and national policies in India have increased the focus on minigrids and their services. In this study, stakeholder interviews were employed to identify the attitudes towards the recent electricity policy, the underlying context for minigrid development, the role of minigrids in rural electrification, and the inclusion of minigrid systems within the larger framework of electricity sector policies by the recent government minigrid policies. Results indicate that stakeholders agree that minigrids, as a rural electricity service, are currently viable to complement the national grid due to their high reliability, performance in remote regions, and diminishing cost per unit. However, stakeholders disagree on the future outcomes, with diverging views on the priority of minigrids as an electrification tool in the face of the expanding central grid, the ideal implementation strategy for minigrids, and the potential for grid‐minigrid interaction. Based on stakeholder feedback, the growth of minigrids in India is likely to be constrained by the confidence in recent policies, necessitating more frequent dialogue among decision makers and a solidified relationship to the national electricity grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian Government and public-private partnerships are developing and disseminating a dizzying number of innovative, networked solutions, broadly known as the Digital India initiative, to increase the efficiency of safety nets and worker productivity and to improve life. Yet, challenges to turn the power of information and other technologies into a farmer-friendly technological revolution for India's 156 million rural households are considerable, including: (1) reliable, up-to-date, location-specific message content for a diverse agriculture to help stratified households shift to productive, knowledge-intensive agriculture as a business-government, private sector, and civil society have big roles to play; (2) digital literacy, i.e., teaching farmers how to choose and use apps, even where the digital divide is absent; apps are, or soon to be, in regional languages; and (3) monitoring actual use and impacts on users' lives by understanding the adoption and adaptation processes. These challenges call for bottom-up, complementary investments in physical, human, and institutional capital, and farmer-friendly e-platforms, while forging ahead with many top-down policy and institutional reforms currently underway, in which progress is real and constraints holding back greater success are better understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With child malnutrition detected as a persistent problem in most of the developing countries, public policy has been directed towards offering community-based supplementary feeding provision and nutritional information to caregivers. India, being no exception, has initiated these programs as early as 1970s under integrated child development scheme. Using propensity score matching technique on primary data of 390 households in two districts of West Bengal, an Eastern state in India, the study finds that impact of being included in the program and receiving supplementary feeding is insignificant on child stunting measures, though the program can break the intractable barriers of child stunting only when the child successfully receives not only just the supplementary feeding but also his caregiver collects crucial information on nutritional awareness and growth trajectory of the child. Availability of regular eggs in the feeding diet too can reduce protein-related undernutrition. Focusing on just feeding means low depth of other services offered under integrated child development scheme, including pre-school education, nutritional awareness, and hygiene behavior; thus repealing a part of the apparent food-secure population who puts far more importance on the latter services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon existing theories, this article argues that good policy design requires two enabling conditions-an optimal design space that balances political and technical goals, and policy capacity that includes organizational and analytical capacity to carry out the implementation. The case of Gujarat's unique 'Jyotigram Yojana' (JGY) is used to illustrate how the policy design process operates in the context of a particularly challenging issue of rural electrification. Our analysis suggests that the design process and implementation of JGY were as much problem-driven as it was politically motivated. A top-down approach favored the conception and implementation of JGY and enabled the state government of Gujarat to effectively leverage its financial, technical, and administrative capacity. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stunting and chronic undernutrition among children in South Asia remain a major unresolved global health issue. There are compelling intrinsic and moral reasons to ensure that children attain their optimal growth potential facilitated via promotion of healthy living conditions. Investments in efforts to ensure that children's growth is not faltered also have substantial instrumental benefits in terms of cognitive and economic development. Using the case of India, we critique three prevailing approaches to reducing undernutrition among children: an over ‐ reliance on macroeconomic growth as a potent policy instrument, a disproportionate focus on interpreting undernutrition as a demand ‐ side problem and an over ‐ reliance on unintegrated single ‐ factorial (one at a time) approaches to policy and research. Using existing evidence, we develop a case for support ‐ led policy approach with a focus on integrated and structural factors to addressing the problem of undernutrition among children in India. Key messagesEliminating child undernutrition is important from an intrinsic perspective and offers considerable instrumental benefits to individual and society.Evidence suggests that an exclusive reliance on a growth ‐ mediated strategy to eliminate stunting needs to be reconsidered, suggesting the need for a substantial support ‐ led strategy.Interpreting and addressing undernutrition as a demand ‐ side problem with proximal single ‐ factorial interventions is futile.There is an urgent need to develop interventions that address the broader structural and upstream causes of child undernutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of renewable energy for transportation has received increasing support in environmental policy-making around the globe. Following this trend, the Indian government launched a large-scale biofuel programme in selected federal states, which involved the ecological rehabilitation of so-called wastelands with energy crops. Although met with considerable opposition from civil society actors, the programme was further expanded and a national biofuel policy was adopted. Employing a critical discourse approach, this study argues that the government's strategy to promote biofuels can be explained based on technocratic design principles that have underpinned previous public policies in India. A consolidated view of these factors indicates that the continued domination of the pro-biofuel discourse draws on a notion of weak ecological modernization. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's demographic trends portend moderately rapid ageing of the population. This, combined with the limited coverage of pension and health care programmes in terms of population, types of risks covered, and benefit levels has led to greater urgency in extending the coverage and reform directions of the current pension and health care programmes. This article analyses three pension and health care initiatives in India directed at the workers and their families engaged in the informal sector. The first initiative, India's National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), undertaken in 1995 provides budget-financed transfers targeted at older persons. It is funded by the Union government but implemented by the state governments. The second initiative, called Swavalamban, was started in 2010, but has been subsumed under Atal Pension Yojana (APY), in the 2015-16 budget. Both are voluntary co-contributory initiatives aimed at providing access to retirement income to low-income individuals (government co-contributing with the individual). Unlike Swavalamban, the APY initiative has provisions for minimum guaranteed pension benefits, with contributions required by the members adjusted accordingly. Effectiveness in increasing enrollment and in sustaining contributions over a longer period will impact on the extent of retirement income security obtained by the members. The third initiative, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), is insurance-based and aims to provide hospital care to low-income households. The article argues that for improving outcomes of these initiatives, more effective implementation, greater fiscal resources, and an integrated and systemic approach which is aided by technology-enabled platforms such as Aadhaar, will be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant 'beneficiary' cash contributions from lower-middle-class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and land tenure - groups referred to in this article as the 'peripheralized middle class' - consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an internalization of a 'willingness to pay' or 'stakeholder' ethos celebrated by development practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article contributes to Gramscian political-ecological conversations on subaltern political agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization-era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal 'slum' as the self-evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, 'world-class' city. The story of Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary - and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar- Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization-era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes - dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated perceptions of wildlife policy and issues through questionnaires ( n = 148) administered to policy makers, conservation scientists, individuals representing non-government organizations (NGOs), and field officials, who implemented government policies and enforced laws. We found significant differences among attitudes of stakeholders identifying major threats to wildlife, the use of science, the role of poaching in conservation, and the composition of species illegally traded. Policy makers and field officials differed in their views with NGOs and scientists on community response to wildlife policies and the varying threat perceptions to different species due to poaching and illegal trade. We noted ambiguity among stakeholders about sustainable use principles in India. Policies must be more effective in conservation and the process of making policy must be broad-based and participatory if wildlife conservation is to advance on the subcontinent. © 2011 The Wildlife Society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While decentralisation is a much‐used term in development discourse, there is lack of clarity about how much autonomy should be granted to local agencies in programme implementation. This is particularly the case in the health sector in developing countries where decentralisation has resulted in the primary health centre (PHC) being identified as the focal point for the delivery of basic health services to rural citizens. An important element of primary healthcare reform has been the implementation of health information systems (HIS). These systems primarily account for monies spent to higher levels of administration and funding bodies rather than account for primary healthcare provision to citizens. In this article, we focus on various emergent processes of change that are occurring under the auspices of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in India to strengthen the interface between the PHC and the community. We present a case study of Gumballi PHC in Karnataka, South India. Our findings reveal ways in which these new processes can be supported by conceptualising the HIS as more than a mere reporting tool. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is a huge, poor, fast developing, centralized and increasingly unequal, democratic country. The core argument of this article is that these and other contextual factors have an impact on the way in which social policies are formulated and implemented. The focus of the article is on two such policies on food and primary education. Based on secondary material and own fieldwork, the shaping of these two policies is discussed and some major characteristics of the two social policy processes are highlighted. This analysis brings to light the existence of two paradoxes present in social policy processes in India: one related to the fact that social policies are important for regime legitimacy but nevertheless suffer from a lack of political commitment; the other related to the fact that centralized decision-making goes together with the widespread involvement of local politicians in policy implementation. These two paradoxes, the article concludes, are the result of the wider context in which social policies are shaped and are hence not easily resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though disasters have been important recurring events in South Asia, the policy framework for addressing the issues arising from disaster has been weak. Taking an alternative perspective on the definition of disaster itself, this article attempts to address the cause of the increasing numbers of disasters in India. I posit that the nation-state still understands disasters as a natural phenomenon, rather than as an intersection between conditions of vulnerability and actual hazards. This is to be observed in the disaster policies adopted. Hence, this article emphasizes the inclusion of ‘vulnerability’ as paramount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]