Participatory plant breeding has attracted lot of attention in the recent past. However, most of the time, farmers’ involvement has been restricted to selections from the material generated by plant breeders as a part of their institutional research. In this paper, I share a few examples of...

Regions of high biodiversity are often inhabited by the poorest people. The irony is that many of local healers and other herbal experts do not even charge for their services to the community. They conserve biological diversity despite remaining poor themselves. Their superior ethics cannot be a...

Surprise is a necessary condition for making a discovery. If a phenomenon out there does not surprise us and thus is not noted by us, could it be because of the familiarity that we have with it. In that case, is perception of an innovation and function of individual theory of social change or...

There is a widespread concern world over about non-sustainability of present developmental strategies and structures in both developed as well as developing world. Most debates have however, ignored the relationship between the region of high biodiversity and high poverty (see IIM Working Paper...

Behavioral experiments conducted so far to establish existence of endowment effect as propounded by prospect theorists typically endow subjects with a single good. In this paper we depart from this setting by giving subjects initial endowment bundles which consist of two goods: chocolates and...

Real corporate governance requires tough financial regulators which effectively work to safeguard investors’ interests in securities and endeavour to create a proper environment for the securities market to develop. The financial regulators – Securities and Exchange Board of India, SEBI in...

In this paper, we study the mechanism of dynamic pricing of electricity and its opportunities in the Indian context. We compare the economic efficiency of dynamic pricing vis-à-vis the traditional flat tariff of electricity. We analyse various ways in which dynamic tariff can be introduced in...

For a country like India, which is committed to the rule of law, the role of police is undergoing changes very rapidly. It is primarily due to the fact that the country has transformed from a police state to welfare state since independence in 1947, and thereafter since India became a Republic...

The corridor allocation problem is one of assigning a given set of facilities in two rows along a straight corridor so as to minimize a weighted sum of the distances between every pair of facilities. This problem has practical applications in arrangements of rooms in oces and in hospitals. The...