This paper discusses the issues of inefficiency in the provision of merit goods, taking the case of public water supply in rural Kerala. The analysis has identified two source of inefficiency in the provision of merit good. First, is due to the fact that the state and its agencies autonomously...

Kerala is in the forefront of decentralisation of powers following the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments. The existence of a large number of health care, educational and other institutions in every Panchayat in Kerala has necessitated decentralisation of every sector as part of the overall...

Opposing views persist with regard to the emergence of plantations in southern India and the transfer of slave labour to these plantations: the abolition of slavery as an end in itself and, second, as a means to an end. In spite of the fact that slavery had been abolished by the mid-nineteenth...

This paper reviews the current status of Indian corporate statistics. It makes a critical evaluation of the various sources of data such as ASI,RBI, ICICI, IDBI, BSE, CMIE and DCA in terms of comprehensiveness, reliability and timeliness. In this process it identifies the gaps in the data and...

This paper attempts to construct a time series estimation of remittances from abroad to the Kerala economy for the period 1972 to 2000. It is now widely acknowledged that foreign remittances in the economy of the State of Kerala in India in the form of money sent by its workers in the Gulf...

This paper examines factors affecting literacy and access to school education in West Bengal, India, and reports the results of a binomial probit model estimated with primary data from ten villages of West Bengal. In the analysis of adult literacy, the significant variables were sex, caste and...

True to the spirit of a social-democratic State, India had originally evolved her power development policy, and shouldered that responsibility, in line with the State's professed commitment to honouring and ensuring social security equations. Though the State Electricity Boards (SEBs) were...

In the context of high levels of public expenditure, already committed to the educational sector in States like Kerala, it is argued that there should be restrictions on further investment. Such arguments are apparently supported by the fact that the birth rate is declining and therefore it will...

This paper takes advantage of the possibility of a critical perspective afforded by the feminist perspective in analyzing the interactions between political and civil societies in the shaping of specific developmental interventions by the state, to examine the People's Planning Campaign (PPC) in...

The economist's conceptualisation of inequality in terms of interpersonal distribution of income or wealth, and the tradition of measurement of inequality that follows from this conceptualisation have not paid adequate attention to the need for reckoning inequality across social groups. In this...