Vol. 5 No. 1 (Jan-Feb) (2024): Indian Public Policy Review

This paper evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges involved in the management and utilisation of health grants in Kerala, a state renowned for its decentralised healthcare system, with the support of empirical evidence from all the urban and rural local governments in the state. It critically explores the factors that led to poor utilisation of health grants through the lens of politicisation, personalisation, corruption, post-office syndrome, capability traps, poor self-esteem, over emphasis on legalistic framework and rule-bound approaches, and relative absence of thick and thin accountability. While the 15^th Union Finance Commission took inspiration from the Kerala model of decentralised healthcare to involve the rural and urban local governments in the health sector and extend additional resources to strengthen the primary health system at the grassroots level with the introduction of health grants, the shocking underutilisation of health grants in the model state is a disappointing one.

This paper examined the trends in private and public expenditure on education in India during the last seven decades. The analysis is based on public expenditure on education compiled by Ministry of Education, Government of India, that includes expenditure incurred by education department as well as by all other departments on education and training-related programmes and activities. The private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) on education as estimated by the national accounts and statistics (NAS) is the base for private expenditure on education. It is observed from the analysis that India’s spending on education reached its peak in the recent past. Public and private expenditure on education are respectively equivalent to 3.9% and 2.7% of its GDP in 2018-19. Together, the country’s spending on education is equivalent to 6.6% of GDP. A notable trend over the past three decades is that private expenditure on education is growing faster than that of the public. The ratio of public to private in terms of expenditure on education has declined during this period. This reflects increasing privatisation of education in India, and has far reaching policy implications.

This study explores the relationship between economic growth and non-income components (health and education) of the Human Development Index (HDI) for 26 Indian states during the period from 1990 to 2019. By applying the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and Dumitrescu and Hurlin panel causality technique, the study identified a strong two-way relationship between economic growth and non-income components in the long run. Public expenditure on health and education did not impact human development outcomes, whereas total expenditure (public and private) did. However, public expenditure on health is crucial in ameliorating households’ financial burden and preventing impoverishment due to catastrophic health expenditure. Furthermore, the analysis of the relationship between different educational levels (primary, secondary, and tertiary education) and the gross state sectoral value added revealed that while education limited to the primary level had no discernible influence on economic activity, secondary and higher education played a pivotal role in determining sectoral economic activity. Secondary education positively influenced agriculture and manufacturing, while higher education significantly shaped the services sector. The impact of higher education on services was four times greater than that of secondary education on manufacturing.

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) is one of the most important constitutional authorities. The CAG is to audit all receipts and expenditures of the governments and to report their findings to the Parliament/Assembly for their accountability. The Constitution and CAG’s Act, 1971  provides total functional freedom to CAG to better serve the objective of public audit; what, when, how, and how much to audit are their prerogatives. All the stakeholders, from the Parliament and Assembly to the common people, can know only what is disclosed in these audit reports. Entrusting the entire audit process to one person without any monitoring mechanism may lead to below average performance or deliberate omission to do their mandated duties. The decreasing number of audit reports in recent years, more focus on administrative audit and evaluation of performance under the pretext of value addition/ aiding for better governance, opaqueness in non-publishing of some audit reports, less coverage of audit, and availability of less resources for audit indicate that the performance of the institution of CAG is not at the expected level. Evolving a system for annual reporting of the audit activities of CAG to the Parliament, without curtailing CAG’s independent functioning, is an immediate need for the accrual of the benefit of public audit; ensuring clean governance without leakage and misuse of public money.

This article reviews the book When the Chips are Down: A Deep Dive into a Global Crisis - the first book that deals with the geopolitics of semiconductors comprehensively from an Indian lens, while placing it simultaneously in the global context. The book demystifies semiconductors and their complex supply chain, alongside the evolving roles of various nation-states in it.  The authors explain the 'meta-critical' aspects of semiconductors using three lenses: geopolitics, geoeconomics, and technology.   Overall, the book is an essential read for policy makers in India; in less than two-hundred pages, it covers the essentials that can help create an action plan for the next twenty years for the Indian semiconductor industry.