Indian Public Policy Review

Tales of a few cities

Bibek Debroy, Devi Prasad Misra — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530

This paper extends a previously developed model for analysing passenger movement using Indian Railways Unreserved Ticketing System (IR-UTS) data to examine urban growth in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Kolkata. The study analyses suburban travel patterns on the Indian Railways network as an indicator of spatial urban expansion. While suburban travel differs from migration, it effectively reveals urban growth patterns. The research integrates geospatial earth observation data with housing property prices to explore relationships between population dispersion and real estate values. Combining processed satellite imagery with Land Use Land Classification (LULC) data enables mapping of urban growth directions. Key findings show suburban travel rebounded post-COVID lockdowns but remains below pre-pandemic levels, potentially due to changed transport preferences or emerging counter-magnets. The analysis examines passenger arrival trends from top origin districts for each metropolitan city to understand urban growth patterns and LULC changes in suburban areas. The methodology demonstrates how high-frequency railway passenger data can effectively track urban spatial expansion when combined with geospatial and property market data. This integrated approach provides valuable insights into post-pandemic urban development patterns across India's major metropolitan centres, offering a novel framework for urban planning and policy analysis.

Farmer Producer Organisations and Institutional Economics

A M Jose, Jos Chathukulam — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530

This paper develops a theoretically grounded and empirically validated framework to analyse Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) through the lens of institutional economics. Drawing on classical, new, and heterodox traditions—including Veblen, Polanyi, Ostrom, and Sen—it proposes a seven-cluster schema spanning transaction costs, collective governance, inclusion, ecological resilience, externalities, livelihood security, and state intermediation. FPOs are conceptualised as hybrid, socio-economic institutions embedded in evolving agrarian systems, not mere market aggregators. The framework is operationalised through mixed-methods fieldwork across 12 FPOs in Kerala, alongside national-level stakeholder validation. Using composite Enabler and Barrier Indices, the study diagnoses institutional strengths and weaknesses across clusters. Results highlight robust performance in governance and coordination, but gaps in inclusion and environmental sustainability, underscoring systemic interdependencies. The framework bridges normative institutional theory with diagnostic utility, offering actionable insights for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. It advances context-sensitive institutional design as a critical lever for strengthening FPO ecosystems and enabling inclusive rural transformation across India and the Global South.

Reforming the Indian Bar: The limits of technological solutions

Varsha Aithala, Karthik Suresh — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530

A majority of Indians do not have effective access to legal services, despite the constitutional promise of access to justice. There are two intertwined reasons for this: the unavailability of a sufficient number of good quality lawyers, and the high costs of accessing legal services. The Indian legal profession is highly unequal, with ‘prestige’ being the currency of upward professional mobility. The professional regulator, the Bar Council of India, simply lacks the capacity to regulate quality. As a consequence, clients lack the information to access lawyers, and to understand the outcomes they desire from them, and the fees they have to pay. Legal aid solutions are only able to cater to a fraction of these unmet legal needs. In this paper, we observe that in the absence of regulatory reform, the Indian state and private players are attempting to use technology to address this capacity problem. The Supreme Court’s e-Courts project promised to transform the system through information technology enablement of courts, while the private legal tech sector has designed several solutions, including lawyer matching platforms for delivery of legal services. However, the success of the e-courts project remains mixed at best, with the litigant remaining underserved, and private sector solutions have failed to reach scale due to regulatory uncertainty and their inability to build trust. The paper argues that technological solutions as currently designed are useful in fixing process-specific issues, but are inadequate to address the more fundamental problem of misaligned incentives and deep-rooted regulatory design flaws of the Indian legal profession, which require much broader scale reform.

Designing for Trust Amidst Information Chaos

Ishoo Ratna Srivastav — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530

The commentary explores how trust is eroding in today’s information-rich world and why thoughtful institutional design is needed. Drawing on learnings from evolutionary sciences, game theory and market design; it discusses mechanisms that reward honesty and cooperation can help reduce chaos, build credibility, and strengthen societies for the long run.

Huawei - A Case Study in China's Tech Ambitions and Geopolitical Power Plays

Shobhankita Reddy, Arindam Goswami — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0530

This review of Eva Dou’s book, "House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China's Most Powerful Company", examines the Chinese tech company’s rise from being a Shenzen pilot project in the 1980s to being caught in today’s geopolitical quagmire. By situating the company against the backdrop of China's changing political economy, it highlights China's tech ambitions and increasing securitisation of technology amidst escalating US-China tensions.