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3899 items in total found

Working Papers | 2019

Financing Infrastructure in India – Issues and the Way Forward

Sebastian Morris

Optimal approaches that recognize the specific kind of market failure/s, in the policy and design of infrastructure, greatly reduce the financing costs and improves the ability of to attract finance in the private provisioning of infrastructure. When state systems are weak organizationally it is first best to strengthen the state capacity so that it can minimally perform the roles of design, regulation, development of frameworks, and of monitoring, for the private provisioning of infrastructure. This is particularly so in the case where there are dual market failures arising out of both the natural monopoly and the appropriability failure aspect. Thus sewerage and water, city roads, multimodal facilities, solid waste, public health care, the challenges have proven beyond the current ability of the state, despite its large commitment to the use of private capital. The challenges in design and policy are large and with many false starts it is only now barely beginning to be considered in India. Thus infrastructure design rather than debilities in financial markets remain the key problem.
The need to develop capital markets and institutions to lend long is vital, but much of the challenge is really in having good projects that are financed keeping in mind the capacity limitations within banks and financial institutions. The potential to use of foreign capital to finance infrastructure is often overstated. Reform of financial institutions (FIs) and banks is vital today, as also the necessary incorporation of interest rate (change) risks into the project cost to overcome adverse selection. The forces leading to the current mess-up of the Indian banks and FIs in lending to infrastructure are brought in perspective. The key issues in developing state capacity, and the changes required for getting the design of infrastructure right, as also to bring functionality to the role of financial institutions in the private development of infrastructure are highlighted.

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Working Papers | 2019

Does GST in India Hurt Producing Regions?
A New Estimate of the Tax Base Under GST of Select States

Sebastian Morris, Ajay Pandey, Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla, and Astha Agarwalla

GST as introduced in India being a destination based tax, does not encourage regions to vigorously promote manufacturing and tradable services industries. Being in the midst of its economic transformation, and given the subnational character of most states (regions), it is important that the states engage in locational tournaments to attract investments, not through tax concessions, but through the provision of infrastructure services, governance, and other intangible services. A new consumption based approach that adjusts the detailed consumer expenditure figures of the National Sample Surveys at the state level is developed. This is shown to be robust and is used to estimate the RNR (Revenue Neutral Rate of Taxes) at the State level. This reveals that there are stark differences between the rates for the producing states and the consumption oriented states amounting to as much as 10% of GDP. These differences cannot be bridged by the proposed compensation scheme. As the impact of GST goes on to the next stage of determining the locational choices of new investments, the lack of fiscal incentives for states to attract and nurture investments, unless corrected would have deleterious effects on the investment process.
As much as 50% of the Centre's collection of GST may have to be distributed based on economic activity centered around manufacturing and tradable services production, if the country is not to lose the steam of high and growing investments to take it through its economic transformation. The contrast with China is remarkable, China's GST is only partial covering only manufacturing and associated labour services, allowing states to tax and retain many services irrespective of the location of the consumer of the service. More importantly as much as 25% of the central collections on account of GST( in manufacturing) go to the provinces based on their public goods production.

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Working Papers | 2019

Whose Empowerment? National Digital Infrastructure and India's Healthcare sector

Rajesh Chandwani, Saneesh Edacherian, and Mukesh Sud

Patient-centric digital infrastructure can potentially enhance the efficiency of the healthcare systems. Even in developed nations evidence suggests low adoption rates for such infrastructure. The Indian government, piggybacking off biometric identity, is setting up digital infrastructure to enable the provision of universal healthcare. Invoking an information ecology perspective, we investigate the physician's perception to this initiative. We find that, equipped with a unique patient identifier and stakeholders' registry, this initiative is perceived to be a game changer and could significantly impact the power dynamics in the healthcare sector. Physicians, who are the key stakeholders in this initiative, are skeptical about the change in the locus of the power, with power residing in 'data' rather than 'professional expertise'. The changes are expected to manifest through monitoring, controlling and managing the data rather than the provision of knowledge-based services. We present recommendations for the design and implementation of this large-scale patient-centric digital infrastructure.

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Working Papers | 2019

Overestimation in the Growth Rates of National Income in Recent Years? – An Analyses Based on Extending GDP04-05 through Other Indicators of Output

Sebastian Morris and Tejshwi Kumari

Quarterly indices of output like those of Industrial Production, other measures of production like net sales, exports, of companies for which data is available, besides proxies like credit to the sector, and indices of price levels have been used to forward project the growth rates of GDP04-05, for the principal sectors of the National Income Accounts (NAS). These were then compared with the growth rates given by the new Gross Value Added (GVA11-12) at constant price measure. It is very highly probable that some sectors of the National Accounts Statistics (NAS) notably Manufacturing, and Trade, Transport, Storage, Hotels and Communication Sectors were overestimated, especially in periods when the output (economic activity) was slowing down. This questions the use of the new GVA series for macroeconomic (policy) actions, wherein more than extensiveness of coverage, the movements over time of the measure have to be reliable and accurate. This is especially so because manufacturing and its related sector-trade etc., are the core sectors which are responsive to changes in policy and to shocks (that could be countered), wherein there is deep overestimation. Some evening out of the overestimation is noticed over the upswing in the business cycle since 2017:2. However the demonetization which rudely reduced demand did not allow the "phase shifting" and "flattening" aspects, which the new GVA series possibly imposes to be examined in detail, although the same is suggested.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Reforming agricultural markets in India: A tale of two model Acts

Sukhpal Singh

Economic & Political Weekly

The union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare had prescribed a model Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act in 2003. The state-level adoption of the act has been tardy and varied in terms of both the magnitude and content of agricultural market reforms. Yet, the ministry under the current central government has come up with another model act, the Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2017, supposedly an improvement over the 2003 act. Among other things, the provision that has grabbed much attention is the removal of contract farming from the APMC domain to a separate model act of Agricultural Produce and Livestock Contract Farming and Services (Promotion and Facilitation). Analysing these draft acts, the paper finds that both the model acts suffer from serious conceptual lacunae that have implications for their application and governance, and, consequently, for inclusive and sustainable agricultural development.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Water ATMs of Indian Railways: Causing a silent revolution

Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers

The case discusses the red tape in the installation and operationalising of automatic water vending machines (AWVMs or popularly, water ATMs) in the railway stations on behalf of the Indian Railways (IR) from the perspectives of the protagonist Mr Siya Ram. Siya Ram is the group general manager of the ‘Rail Neer’ initiative of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a Government of India enterprise. Rail Neer is the bottled water brand of IRCTC.

The case deals with the product development and project execution of installing water ATMs in Indian railway stations. The project was conceptualized as early as 2007; nearly 50 water ATMs were installed in several railway stations, but the project was soon declared closed due to numerous operational hurdles. The Ministry of Railways (MoR) revived the project in 2015 and assigned IRCTC to install water ATMs in 7,500 stations. After the due process, IRCTC empanelled a set of qualified vendors to install the water ATMs; but the overall progress of commissioning and operationalizing was far from impressive. There were huge delays and hiccups, which had commercial implications for the vendors. Therefore, vendors were likely to be discouraged and could choose to not engage any further in the project. According to Mr Siya Ram, the fundamental issue was the delay in roll out of water ATMs arising due to lack of coordination between the vendors, station superintends, and IRCTC. How he attempts to resolve the issue is the focus of the case.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Functioning of Boards in PSBs in India

Sunil Kumar Maheshwari and Ramesh Bhat

Indian Journal of Industrial Relations

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Journal Articles | 2018

The Teaching of Soft Communication Skills in Entrepreneurship Development Courses at the+ 2 Level in India

Sushmita Chakravarti and Saikat Chakraborty

IUP Journal of Soft Skills

Entrepreneurs play an important role in the economic development of emerging economies such as India, and Entrepreneurship Development Programs (EDP) at various life stages boost it. EDP’s impact at the +2 level is strategic and timely as it adds self-sufficiency to the young who are either forced to or willingly take up entrepreneurship after their +2 education. Creating a new venture and the sea of uncertainties and risks involved in entrepreneurship can be daunting and frustrating, testing the tenacity of the +2 students’ soft skills, especially soft communication skills. Soft communication skill helps in information gathering, customer handling, teamwork, communicating with stakeholders, establishing relationships, and in tackling the challenges involved in venture creation. This paper thus argues for the teaching of soft communication skills in entrepreneurship development courses at the + 2 level, and highlights the need for and benefits of taking such initiatives, whilst suggesting certain broad guidelines in this regard.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Web content analysis of online grocery shopping web sites in India

Tamushree Banerjee and Arindam Banerjee

International Journal of Business Analytics

This article evaluates online grocery shopping web sites catering to customers primarily in India. The process of evaluation has been carried out in 3 parts using Rapidminer. In part A, the authors have studied the similarity in content that resides on the grocery shopping web sites. Using unstructured data from homepage of grocery shopping websites and the keywords specified for the web sites, the authors have made an effort to establish a cosine similarity index amongst them. In part B, the authors have analysed the customer reviews from the web sites. Studying the resulting association rules, authors have attempted to identify the attributes that drive customer happiness. In part C, the authors have documented the web traffic metric parameters (attributes) measured by search engine optimization (SEO) tool web sites. Hence, the created a correlation matrix to determine the parameters that are significantly impacting per day revenue for the web sites.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Efficient mining of high utility itemsets with multiple minimum utility thresholds

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Mining high utility itemsets is considered to be one of the important and challenging problems in the data mining literature. The problem offers greater flexibility to a decision maker in using item utilities such as profits and margins to mine interesting and actionable patterns from databases. Most of the current works in the literature, however, apply a single minimum utility threshold value and fail to consider disparities in item characteristics. This paper proposes an efficient method (MHUI) to mine high utility itemsets with multiple minimum utility threshold values. The presented method generates high utility itemsets in a single phase without an expensive intermediate candidate generation process. It introduces the concept of suffix minimum utility and presents generalized pruning strategies for efficiently mining high utility itemsets. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated against the state-of-the-art methods (HUI-MMU-TE and HIMU-EUCP) on eight benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method delivers two to three orders of magnitude execution time improvement over the HUI-MMU-TE method. In addition, MHUI delivers one to two orders of magnitude execution time improvement over the HIMU-EUCP method, especially on moderately long and dense benchmark datasets. The memory requirements of the proposed algorithm was also found to be significantly lower.

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IIMA