This note raise many policy issues related to real estate and the urban sector. Urban issues and the very high cost of real estate in India have deep rooted problems that have their origin in the policy, law and working of government. The potential of high growth to deliver benefits to people...

The concession agreement for the modernization and operation of Indira Gandhi International airport in Delhi and Chhatrapati Shivaji International airport at Mumbai respectively is referred to as Operation Management and Development Agreement (OMDA). The OMDA was a part of a set of transaction...

This paper attempts to delineate the possible role of goverance oriented reform in India today. We raise conceptual and historical difficulties with the notion that sees governance failure as the cause of poor economic performance. We discuss why there are certain regularities in the occurance...

The nature of governance has differed widely across societies, and what is more interesting, within any particular society depending upon the stage of development. Governance is better defined in functional rather than in value terms. Functional governance aids and abetts industrialisation....

Special economic zones following the enormous success of China have been widely imitated. But it is to be entirely anticipated that the results would vary greatly. Earlier avatars of SEZs in the form of Foreign Trade Zones (FTZs) and Export Promotion Zones (EPZs) were important in the export led...

The IT industry (both software and hardware) is characterised by `vast consumer side scale and scope economies which are incomparably larger than in other industries with supply side network economies like pipelines or electricity distribution. In IT the supply side economies are also...

Reform of the oil sector is long overdue. The problems in the sector emanate from the structure of central taxes and the system of subsidisation through prices. Solutions to the problems necessarily have to address both tax and subsidy simultaneously. The social losses include, misuse / wasteful...

We bring out the fundamental and more important problems with the current framework of land acquisition in India, regulations on land and the functioning of land markets. We argue that reform is overdue and the current framework would be unsustainable in a democracy that is India. Current land...

Land in India is problematic largely because of archaic and perverse provisions in the practice and the law. The new Land Acquisition Amendment Bill does go some way to correct the anti-democratic and imperial provisions of the old 1894 Act. Other regulatory restraints stand in the way of fair...

Container movement by rail was a monopoly of Indian Railways (IR) until recently and its subsidiary, Container Corporation (CONCOR) was the sole operator of container trains. Entry of other entities in 2007 has been driven by larger public policy concerns. In the process, issues such as...