Indian Public Policy Review

Bridging the Data Gap

Shruti Gupta, Tanvi Vipra, Anoop Singh — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0530

India’s public sector compensation system is characterised by fragmented reporting, incomplete coverage, and inconsistent classification, which leads to a systematic understatement of fiscal commitments. Addressing these gaps is essential for fiscal sustainability, intergovernmental equity, and statistical accuracy for sound policy planning. Definitions of both the public sector and compensation differ widely across institutions, limiting comparability and weakening fiscal analysis. As a result, official statistics systematically understate compensation bills. This report highlights critical reporting data gaps in government accounts and estimates a more accurate fiscal cost of public sector employment.

Selective Strategic Autonomy in Critical Minerals and Devices

Subash Chandra Bose Rapaka — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0530

Viksit Bharat 2047 offers an opportunity to strengthen the materials and electronics capabilities underpinning India’s digital, industrial, space, and strategic ambitions. This paper develops a framework for selective strategic autonomy in critical materials and devices, combining domestic capability in priority segments with diversified international partnerships for inputs India cannot supply competitively. Thermoelectrics, the solid-state conversion of heat into electricity and of electricity into cooling, without moving parts, provides a deliberately bounded probe case. Its compact mine-to-module value chain allows mineral governance, technology access, manufacturing, finance, qualification, and recovery to be examined together. The paper presents three scenarios for 2047 and identifies strategic autonomy with managed interdependence as the most practical pathway. It proposes a next-stage agenda building on the NCMM, ISM, PLI schemes, iDEX, and Centres of Excellence through stage-specific finance, technology partnerships, selective module manufacturing, domestic qualification, and circular recovery. By-product recovery, mine waste, end-of-life devices, and segregated pharmaceutical waste are identified as feedstocks requiring pilot-scale validation. It also recommends an early mission-mode programme for high-temperature materials, module reliability, and qualification for strategic and space applications. Its contribution is a practical mine-to-module roadmap for converting India’s policy foundations and research strength into resilient capability in selected deep-tech segments.

Designing for Optionality

Akash Goel — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0530

Three developments in 2026 frame the argument of this paper. On April 6, the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam achieved first criticality. Three weeks earlier, missiles struck the Ras Laffan industrial complex in Qatar, and by late April India was contracting urea imports at close to twice the price prevailing in February. On June 26, the Department of Atomic Energy inaugurated a facility producing hydrogen from the copper-chlorine thermochemical cycle using process heat drawn from the Fast Breeder Test Reactor, the first such installation anywhere in the world. India’s urea import dependence rests on the Haber-Bosch process, which requires a large and continuous supply of hydrogen, and that hydrogen is at present made from natural gas. Nuclear process heat offers a different route to that hydrogen, and India has now demonstrated the core of it at bench and pilot scale. This paper does not argue that India should build integrated nuclear-fertiliser complexes now. It argues something narrower. The greater part of India’s planned nuclear capacity is still in the designing stage, and decisions being taken today about reactor design, site allocation, environmental clearance and the rules under the SHANTI Act, 2025 will determine whether integration remains available as a future choice or becomes practically foreclosed. This paper tries establishing six provisions that would keep the option open. Each is inexpensive to adopt now, and difficult or impossible to add once a reactor has been built and licensed.

Beyond the Last Petrol Pump

Rahul Sharma — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0530

India's March 2026 LPG and Natural Gas Control Orders — issued under the Essential Commodities Act 1955 in response to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz — demonstrated both the institutional capacity and the structural limitations of India's downstream petroleum architecture. While the government's crisis response was effective, it was reactive. This paper identifies five structural deficiencies: the absence of an operational neutral wholesale petroleum market; the absence of a comparably clear standalone open-access framework for downstream terminal and rack capacity used for product lifting by independent operators; the absence of a formal industry-wide emergency petroleum stockholding framework specifying obligations, reporting and release conditions; the absence of a pre-established National Essential Petroleum User Registry (NEPUR); and the absence of a pre-crisis framework for triggering domestic supply-protection measures. The paper argues that the March 2026 disruption exposed institutional questions about how available petroleum supply is priced, moved, buffered and prioritised during stress. Five targeted policy steps are proposed, several of which can be pursued within existing statutory authority while others would require subordinate regulatory measures or amendments.

P. R. Brahmananda at 100

A M Jose, Jos Chathukulam — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0530

P. R. Brahmananda (1926–2003) was one of the most original and independent voices in Indian economics. His birth centenary provides an occasion for critical re-evaluation of a body of work whose concerns remain strikingly contemporary. Best known for the Vakil–Brahmananda wage-goods approach, he challenged the heavy-industry bias of Second Plan strategy by arguing that employment expansion in a labour-surplus economy required adequate supplies of food and other basic consumption goods. His later monetary writings, developed amid monetarist debates and stagflation, extended the same concern with mass welfare by treating inflation as a threat to real wages and livelihood security. This commentary reads these contributions as a coherent framework linking employment, productive capacity, price stability and welfare. It also uses that framework to interpret current debates on rural employment guarantees, including the transition from MGNREGA to VB–G RAM G, and argues that inclusive growth requires employment expansion to be supported by both wage-goods supply and macroeconomic stability.