Ebola and India

The biggest-ever Ebola epidemic is taking place is West Africa. Through travellers, this could spread elsewhere. Carriers are asymptomatic for 2-21 days, and hence border screening does not block transmission.

Ebola is very virulent. That is, the Pr(death|infection) is high. However, it is not a complicated pathogen for a public health system to deal with. It has no method of jumping to new victims other than direct contact with body fluids. This is unlike (say) a virulent airborne influenza where there is no easy strategy for blocking transmission. The simple strategy of tracing, diagnosing and isolating cases suffices to block Ebola in its tracks.

Ebola is easy if and only if there is a capable public health system through which tracing, diagnosing and isolating cases is easy. It's a disaster for the countries that don't have such a capability.

Do the public health authorities in India have this organisational capability? We in India will be sorely tested, for we do not have a focus on public goods in our health system.

Our health system is a socialist mish-mash of a government that produces and gifts out private goods. We try to run primary health centres, we try to run hospitals, and such like. We don't do the things that a public health system does -- such as the analysis and control of epidemics. We lack the intellectual clarity that the public health system is not about the health of the public; it is about public goods in the problem of health. This could prove to be a costly mistake in coming weeks and months, if Ebola spreads well beyond West Africa.

The fact that most people in India cremate the dead, and that we don't have rituals which involve touching the victim, will help. Cremation procedures will need to be modified to address the biohazard.

Elections in Maharashtra: Have the fires of nativism subsided?

by Naman Pugalia, Renuka Sane, Viral Shah.

The results of the Assembly polls in Maharashtra are anxiously awaited. The four main contenders, the Congress, the NCP, the Shiv Sena, and the BJP have all been part of one of the two principal coalitions, the Democratic Front (Congress and the NCP) which ruled the state for the last 15 years, and the Mahayuti (Shiv Sena and the BJP) that has been the principal opposition alliance.

The battle against the `other'

After these two principal alliances in Maharashtra broke up, ahead of the assembly elections, political parties have been quick to rouse nativist sentiments to secure the Marathi vote. Each political party contesting in Maharashtra, and especially in Bombay, has been vying for the "marathi manoos": the BJP by bringing together Narendra Modi and Chattrapati Shivaji, and the Shiv Sena and the upcoming Maharashtra Navanirman Sena reacting strongly against such a comparison, comparing the BJP leaders as foot soldiers of Afzal Khan, the commander of the Adil Shahi, who was killed by Shivaji. At heart seems to be the idea that the son-of-the-soil will never prefer an outsider as the ruler of the state.

The roots of this angst date back to the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement launched in 1955 in Pune. As Kumar Ketar in the Asian Age says:

the business lobbies, mostly consisting of the Gujarati's and Marwaris wanted Mumbai to be an independent city state or a bi-lingual or autonomous city state. But the mass movement led by Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti foiled that plan. The Marathi angst of the time was one of the reasons for the Shiv Sena's rise, and continues to the reason for the undeclared hostility between the Gujarati-Marwari business community and the Marathi working class.

The Gujarati-Marathi antagonism was mostly restricted to Bombay. In other parts of Maharashtra, it has always been a "Maratha" vote, something that the Congress and the NCP had capitalised on over the last few decades. In the 54 years since Maharashtra was formed, the Congress has ruled the State for 49 years. Of its 17 Chief Ministers, 10 have been Marathas. The outgoing cabinet did not have a single non-Maratha!

By this logic, you would have expected that a national party, with a low support base in Maharashtra in the past, with a Gujarati leader and a Gujarati campaign manager, would not fare that well in the coming elections.

Several commentators, have, however argued that the new Marathi middle class has moved on in its economic and cultural ambitions. It no longer shares the sense of injustice that was the cornerstone of the Samyukta movement, and is in fact, brimming with enthusiasm to participate in the new India. In addition, over the years, migration on a large scale has taken place into Bombay and it's environs, and into Poona, which has created a new set of immigrant voters.

How relevant is the issue of the "marathi-manoos"?

FourthLion Technologies has been conducting message testing polls in the run up to the elections in Maharashtra to tease out voter preferences using its Instavaani. The methodology involves using a control and multiple treatments, and comparing the treatments to the control to get a relative understanding of the persuasion power of different messages.

In a message testing poll, the control is a simple horse-race poll, that asks voters to pick the party or candidate of their choice. The poll on October 1, 2014, showed that 41% of voters preferred the BJP, 11% Congress, 14% Shiv Sena and 11% the NCP. BJP was comfortably in the lead. This is the control.

In each treatment, a particular message is read out to the listener, and then the horse-race question is asked again. Differences from the control give us a sense of the immediate short-term impact of this message on the minds of the populace. These polls are conducted by randomly sampling phone numbers across the entire state. The poll typically strives for 200-400 observations. With assumptions of perfect random sampling of a small sample from a representative population, the margin of error is 0.98/sqrt(n). At 200 samples, the margin of error is 7%, and at 400 samples, it is 5%. These polls are typically carried out as soon as news breaks out, and situations develop in real-time, allowing the observation of the mood of the people within hours after an event.

Here are some results which illuminate attitudes to nativism:

1. `Prithviraj Chavan is a true son of Maharashtra. He went to school in Karad, which is in south Maharashtra. His mother and father, Premalakaki and Dajisaheb Chavan, went to jail because they fought for an independent state of Maharashtra. No other candidate for Chief Minister has the same legacy of fighting for Maharashtra as Prithviraj Chavan'.
   

   Would you vote for	% of respondents
   BJP	31%
   Congress	26%
   Shiv Sena	15%
   NCP	11%
   Others	17%

   This shows that the CM's background matters quite a bit, and led 10 percentage points of voters to switch from the BJP to the Congress. This also explains why Prithviraj Chavan led the Congress' campaign in the state - his popularity is higher than the party's.
2. `In 1960, Gujarati minister Morarji Desai ordered police to fire on activists of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, killing 105 Marathis. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti activists won their fight to create an independent state of Maharashtra. Today, the BJP is bringing Gujaratis such as Amit Shah to again place Maharashtra under Gujarati dominance'.
   

   Would you vote for	% of respondents
   BJP	33%
   Congress	14%
   Shiv Sena	25%
   NCP	11%
   Others	17%

   If there was indeed strong antagonism about Gujaratis, this question should have caused a lot of people to switch votes out of the BJP. However, only 8% of the voters seems to have moved away from the BJP, mostly to the Shiv Sena.
   
3. `The BJP has no leaders in Maharashtra who are clean, honest and capable of running the state government. That is why the BJP has to parachute in outsiders like the Prime Minister and Amit Shah to campaign for them. The BJP is afraid to announce who their CM candidate will be because their local leaders, including Devendra Fadnavis and Eknath Khadse, are inexperienced and unqualified to run the second-largest state in India, and also have dozens of criminal charges against them'.
   

   Would you vote for	% of respondents
   BJP	39%
   Congress	15%
   Shiv Sena	19%
   NCP	10%
   Others	17%

   This yielded the least movement away from the BJP: only two percentage points, which is not statistically significant. 39% of voters continue to root for the BJP. It shows there is far greater confidence in the BJP leadership than in that of any other parties.
   

This post is about nativism, so we don't talk about other measurement of how voters feel. But one point must be made. None of these treatments work as well as other treatment messages that talk about construction of roads, public works, anti-corruption, etc. These results suggest that the passions of caste and creed are now less important; that the history of the Gujarati-Marathi antagonism has faded from memory. By this logic, the BJP was perhaps on the right track in breaking away from the Shiv Sena, and focusing on its core messages of development and good governance. This is what voters in Maharashtra seem to care about.

Implications

We may conjecture that three things are going on:

1. Part of the reason for this move away from nativist sentiment is the personal appeal of the Prime Minister. His approval ratings, measured in a survey FourthLion did for Mint on August 16, 2014, were highest in Maharashtra and West Bengal. In the bye-polls, there was very little involvement of the Prime Minister, and the BJP did not do well. It is no surprise then that the BJP is seeking votes under the Modi banner, with messages like "Chalo chale Modi ke saath" ("let's walk with Modi") and "Ab ki bar Modi sarkar" ("this time let's make it the Modi administration").
2. Anti-incumbency against the state government, and the 2 parties (INC + NCP) that jointly governed the state for 15 years, has voters looking for an alternative. Given the BJP's own brand, their assessment of being able to achieve a majority on their own, and the country beginning to taste the benefits of a clear mandate, the BJP has an edge in asking voters in Maharashtra and Haryana to give it a clear mandate in the states too, so that they can work well with the Centre.
3. But most important is the fact that the Indian electorate has moved on. The desire of the voter to look beyond tribal considerations is the reason why Maharashtra might be the first state to throw up a verdict that challenges preconceived notions about the eternal power of old hatreds.

Does this have implications for regional parties elsewhere in India? Many regional parties may have to go in for radical reconstruction if nativist fires are subsiding. Some, like the BSP, have begun doing this. The entire eastern and southern belt, which sees strong regional parties - West Bengal, Orissa, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu - could see change. While Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand will give us some more intuition in the coming few months, Bihar is going to be the next big test in 2015.

One possible argument is that Maharashtra is a better state, with greater exposure to new ideas, low levels of violence, and a successful economy. In contrast, the backward parts of East India may still be trapped in the old nativist ways. But what about the South? The developments in Maharashtra could be particularly portentious for the better states of the South.

The politics of Bombay has long been benighted by the problem of nativism. What was once a great metropolis has been bogged down by decades of nativist politics. These results show a possibility for becoming a normal city, where the political questions that matter are about efficiently producing local public goods.

Scientific management for election campaigns in India

by Viral Shah.

From 2010, I worked in the Aadhaar project for three years. This helped me learn how Government works and how it does not. The one big takeaway from my experience of working with the Executive arm of the Government was that to bring about true and lasting change, to restructure our defunct institutions and build new ones, one needs to engage with the Legislative arm, with politicians.

Politics in India is a cottage industry. Everybody loves to talk about it; most are cynical; very little is known about how things actually work. The professional ways of working -- which are found in business, science and slowly in government -- are least visible in politics. In particular, the crucible of politics -- the election campaign -- is just black art. In the last 20 years, we have seen family businesses get shaken up, professionalise, and embrace technology and process engineering. We have seen some parts of government do the same. We have seen a transformation of some parts of academiaa. The one place which has seen the least change is politics in general and election campaigns in particular.

This suggests opportunities for achieving important change. Shankar Maruwada, Naman Pugalia and I started a company -- FourthLion Technologies -- to provide professional services to political campaigns. Over a couple of campaigns, we have slowly learned how elections in India work. We have looked at an array of data from various public and private sources, and developed tools and technologies to aid election campaigns in multiple phases.

Elsewhere in the world, election campaigns are run through scientific management. In the US, both the Democratic and Republican parties have voter databases, where one can search for any voter by name. Through a variety of analytical methods, campaigns know fairly well which voters are likely to vote for them, and which ones are marginal, and on which groups of voters, no resources should be expended. Starting with such databases, every voter contact is recorded (a volunteer knock, a telephone call, a letter sent, an email, or a tweet) in the same way companies manage customer services through a CRM system. It took a decade of work for the machinery of election campaigns in the US to get to this stage, to transplant ideas which were well developed in the world of business.

When thinking about election campaigns in India in a professional way, there are many challenges. There are multiple parties, many races are multi-cornered, and with first-past-the-post elections, a candidate can win with as few as 20-30% of the votes. The voter lists are very poor in quality, with every possible error of inclusion and exclusion. They do not capture the large scale of urban migration and are often tampered with. Although the Election Commission of India has made great strides in conducting free and fair elections over the last several decades, much more remains to be done, and the quality of the voter list is perhaps the weakest link in Indian democracy today.

Every election has three natural phases: Registration, Persuasion, and Turnout. A campaign should start 6-12 months before voting date, by registering voters. Three months before the election, voters need to know the candidate and be persuaded, and finally the last week is focussed on "Get The Vote Out", or Turnout. At each stage of the campaign, one has to focus on the message and mobilisation. The message is all about what the candidate says and does, and mobilisation is about execution on the ground, in the digital sphere and in the media. Each stage as a distinct methodology for scientific management, and the problems faced can be quite surprising. As an example, it is not uncommon for 2 to 3% of the population of a constituency to be working for all the candidates, put together, in the last 2-3 weeks. This calls for the processes of large-scale management.

We provide tools and technologies for different parts of the campaign, starting with coalition dynamics, seat selection, analysis of past elections, formulation and testing of messages, calculating the reach of every channel (hoardings, TV, radio, print, etc.), managing call centres, and a control room for the turnout operation and voting day. We use data, analytics, and technology at every stage of a campaign to aid decision making and efficient deployment of resources. Traditional politics often deploys resources in a "Spray and Pray" manner, while we try to combine all available information and intuition so as to use resources more effectively.

In our experience, an incumbent who has a good chance of getting the ticket has a head start as he is able to do preparatory work for the campaign well ahead of time. As emphasised above, the campaign should really start 6-12 months before the voting. All too often, in India, candidate selection is left to the last minute. This makes it impossible to mount a serious campaign, and generally plays in favour of the incumbent. Once we start thinking of an election campaign as a systematic project, this induces the discipline of a minimum time period that is required to execute all the steps, just as is the case with all well planned projects.

On one hand, our thinking about process improvement for election campaigns consciously draws from successful techniques of scientific business management which have been perfected in the worlds of business, science and government in India. Along the way, we have seen that the speed, agility, and scale required in political campaigns in India is something unique when compared with the worlds of business, science and government in India. To some extent, we are seeing innovations in the field of election campaigns that can usefully inform, and sometimes get directly transplanted, into the other three worlds.

We are learning how our democracy works. The accountability is jarring, as any politician will tell you: voters make every possible demand, and speak their mind to the candidate, in as direct a way as can be. Millions of micro-deals are struck with candidates by individuals and groups of people. These are genuine deals about actions of the State and not bribery or corruption. These micro-deals bubble up into the processes of government and ultimately shape policy. It is a rough and tumble world which clashes against our dreams of representative democracy, but it is also astonishing how much this is about representative democracy.

Should a government subsidise the purchase of energy-efficient equipment?

Today the Financial Express has a story, where LED bulbs costing Rs.400 will be sold at Rs.10 with the government paying for the difference. Does this make sense? I think it does not, and that this situation calls for a lot more sophistication in thinking about public policy.

What's the market failure?

The first and obvious place where this spending program fails to make the grade is on the question of public goods. I get a gift of Rs.390 to have a LED bulb, I benefit. The bulb is a private good. A gift to people who buy LED bulbs is as wrong as government spending on other private goods. Just as we criticise a government which runs health clinics for perambulatory care, we should criticise the government when it gifts money to people for the folks who buy LED bulbs. This is just the faddish thinking of one bunch of hausfraus running policy versus another.

The guiding question, in all design of government, should be: What's the market failure? I am not able to see a market failure in the working of the market for LED bulbs.

Get the prices right

Some people in the field of energy have an almost moralistic perspective on energy efficiency. Higher energy efficiency is seen as a good thing, regardless of cost. This is the wrong way to think about it. Energy efficiency is just one part of economic efficiency. An LED lamp is a big up front payment and then a stream of gains in the future. Whether the LED lamp is worth putting in depends on (a) The magnitude of each gain (i.e. how much you use that lamp) and (b) The discount rate. If the interest rate is high, it will make sense to buy a Tungsten bulb instead.

To obtain efficiency in the field of energy we should think about three things:

1. The first is the question of pricing of energy. When energy is cheap, it will be squandered by consumers, and vice versa. Externalities should be priced in. The biggest externality that is not being priced in is carbon emissions. When we fix these mistakes, the price of energy will go up, which will encourage people to buy energy efficient equipment.
2. When a household chooses to get capital goods of more or less energy efficient equipment, the flip side of these decisions are the capital goods that will be invested upstream, in the large factories of the energy industry such as generation utilities or natural gas infrastructure. Optimality requires that society should solve that overall problem correctly, and the overall problem is the combination of energy production, energy transportation and the end-devices which use energy. It is not obvious that the greatest bang for the buck is always obtained at the device end.
3. For that overall problem to be solved correctly, consumers and energy companies should be hanging off a sensible financial system which shows interest rates to both which are internally consistent. The failures of the Bond-Currency-Derivatives Nexus in India hamper that. The interest rates seen by households (which determine their purchase of LED bulbs) are strange, and the interest rates seen by the energy industry are quite different and also strange.

The engineer in me marvels at LED lamps. I was thrilled when the 2014 Nobel Prize went to the geniuses who made blue LEDs; this is simply one of the great sagas of the 20th century. I have watched Shuji Nakamura ever since he moved to UCSB in 1999. But this `gee whiz' should not blind us on questions of public policy; we should be hard headed in how we thinking about what government does. Most of what government in India does is not the job of government; most of what government ought to do in India is not being done. The rocket science that we require in India is the great organising principle of the market economy -- the Bond-Currency-Derivatives Nexus.

Author: Susan Thomas

On this blog:

• Electricity cost recovery and the political imagination: A comparison between private and public distribution in India's biggest cities, 2 November 2025.
• The economies of Russia and Ukraine in the war, 18 August 2025.
• Households that live within their means in India, 11 July 2025.
• Get them to the court on time: bumps in the road to justice, 12 June 2025.
• Who lends to the Indian state?, 24 August 2024.
• Rethinking innovation policy in India: amplifying spillovers through contracting-out, 21 March 2024.
• Survey-based measurement of Indian courts, 13 January 2024.
• How substantial are non-substantive hearings in Indian courts: some estimates from Bombay, 6 December 2023.
• Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes, 15 June 2023.
• Learning by doing and public procurement in India, 5 November 2022.
• The make vs. buy decision of the union government, 18 September 2022.
• Identifying roadblocks in highway contracting: lessons from NHAI litigation, 13 July 2022.
• Measuring financial inclusion: how much do households participate in the formal financial system?, 3 July 2022.
• How did courts respond to the pandemic lockdowns: evidence from the NCLT, 27 March 2022.
• The footprint of union government procurement in India, 20 December 2021
• Lessons from the COVID-19 vaccine procurement of 2021, 15 November 2021.
• But clouds got in my way: Bias and bias correction of nighttime lights data in the presence of clouds, 11 October 2021.
  

• Delays in liquidated and resolved firms: Visualisation of an output measure of the Indian bankruptcy reform , 30 March 2019.
• The geography of firms and firm formation in India, 1 March 2019.
  

• The Indian bankruptcy reform: The state of the art, 2018, 22 December 2018.
• Watching markets work: Structural change in the Nifty implied volatility, 29 September 2018.
  

• The Indian bankruptcy reform: The state of the art, 2017, 13 July 2017.
  

• Watching markets work: The dramatic events of 8 November 2016, 4 December 2016.
• Direct participation in the Indian equity market: First estimates of some basic facts, 11 November 2016.
• Watching markets work: The `surgical strikes' of 29 September 2016, 9 November 2016.
• India's bankruptcy reforms: Where we are, and where we go next, 18 May 2016.

• Is India a hospitable environment for India-related finance, 29 September 2015.
• Witch hunt against PNs considered harmful, 10 August 2015.  

• How to strengthen the New Pension System, 9 October 2014.
• What role is played by commodity futures in India? 10 September 2014.
• What does algorithmic trading do to market quality? 1 September 2014.
• NPAs processed by asset reconstruction companies -- where did we go wrong? 23 August 2014.
• Concerns about individual investors on the Indian equity derivatives market, 29 July 2014.

How to strengthen the National Pension System

by Renuka Sane and Susan Thomas.

When the Old Age Social and Income Security (OASIS) committee was created in 1998, it was asked to design a pension system that: (a) increased pension coverage on the large area, population and diversity of India; (b) was low cost; (c) was accessible to unsophisticated participants; (d) provided choice of investment; (e) was backed by sound regulation; and (f) had long-run sustainability. The report of the OASIS committee recommended the creation of the National Pension System (NPS), a pension system that was innovative even by the standards of pension systems in developed economies. The design included the following features:

• Individual accounts with defined contributions.
  
• Central record keeping agency which will provide a single account balance statement for each individual, and will move net funds to the fund managers.
  
• Investments managed by multiple pension fund managers, each offering standardised asset products. Auction based selection of fund managers where the selection is based on the sum of fees and expenses.
  
• Collection of contributions done through a network of banks, post offices and other "points of presence" across the country.
  
• Withdrawals permitted only after age 60, with a minimum mandatory annuitisation of 40 percent of the terminal pension funds.
  
• EET tax treatment, where benefits and withdrawals are taxed as ordinary income.
  

The NPS became operational in 2004 for new recruits to the central government. A central recordkeeping agency (CRA) and selection of fund managers through auctions have led to some of the lowest cost structures in the world. The NPS has grown to having 7.1 million accounts, and Rs. 0.6 trillion in assets under management. While it is mandatory for new recruits to the central government, it can be accessed by all. A co-contribution scheme called NPS-Swavalamban encourages participation by poor households in the informal sector.

After a decade of existence, there is need to examine the existing NPS and compare the performance of this system to the goals with which it was created. In a recent paper, we analyse the NPS from this perspective.

Problems with the implementation of the NPS

While several of the key features of the existing system are consistent with the original design features, there are certain critical areas in which the NPS has deviated. There continues to be an attempt to reduce transactions costs in the system, with a central record keeping agency and a limited number of pension fund managers. However, the NPS has several flaws at the ease of accessibility as well as the choice of investments to the pension contributor:

Low transparency: One of the progressive features of the original NPS design was high transparency about cumulations for the NPS member contributors. However, this has not been implemented. Members do not always get communications regarding their pension wealth. There is as yet, no clarity on how long the process of contribution deduction to actual investment takes, and the costs incurred in the form of lost interest owing to delays in the process (if any) on the customer. The PFRDA does not make available aggregate details about assets under management, number of accounts, or cumulated returns. This lack of transparency leads to a lack of awareness and trust in the system, and reduces the quality of policy analysis.

Lack of investment choice: Government employees are not allowed a choice of investment strategy, or pension fund manager. The default investment option of government employees is badly structured - it does not cater to the best interests of participants. International diversification is not permitted.

Inconsistency in tax treatment: Schemes such as the GPF and the CPF continue to be taxed on a EEE basis, while the NPS is taxed on a EET basis. Employee contributions to the NPS above Rs.100,000 are taxed. These tax inconsistencies need to be rationalised.

Confusion: A key element of the original NPS was that it was one single pension system serving the entire country. For a variety of tactical reasons, before the PFRDA Act was passed by Parliament, a series of variants of NPS were created. These create complexity, hamper portability, and increase cost. It is time to go back to one single NPS.

Broader policy problems

Beyond the scope of the original NPS design, there are other policy issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve the end objective with which the NPS was commissioned: the goal of providing old age income security with coverage across the breadth and length of India.

One such issue deals with the question of the annuity the NPS contributor member can expect to access as a pensioner. The price of an annuity will influence the monthly pension available to a pensioner. If annuity prices are very high, it will have a detrimental impact on the pension payout. As of yet, there has been no active effort on the part of the PFRDA to enable the pensioner to obtain the lowest cost annuity product. Similarly, there has been no effort to design a common draw-down policy that works in the interest of both government employees and lower-income, informal sector workers, both of whom contribute to the NPS.

Another area of broad policy concern has centered around the sales of NPS so far. This has been perceived as very low, and has led to suggestions to incentivise sales intermediaries to push the sales of NPS, by improving their commissions. However, experience from the mutual fund and insurance industries in India shows that a combination of high-powered sales incentives without any liability for mis-selling does not lead to an increase in retail participation. Instead, it can lead to defrauding of customers. This suggests that it would be imprudent for the PFRDA to incentivise the sale of the NPS in an environment that is characterised by a lack of strong consumer protection. The PFRDA needs to first re-orient its strategy towards an explicit goal of consumer protection, with a clear enumeration of the rights of consumers and obligations of sellers. A relevant benchmark that provides explicitly for protections against misleading conduct by sales agents is the Indian Financial Code.

The light at the end of the tunnel

One of the key bottlenecks for the NPS since it was implemented in 2003, was the lack of a sound regulatory framework that was implemented by an empowered and independent regulator. While the PFRDA has been in place at the same time that the NPS was implemented, it has awaited the passage of the PFRDA Bill for a regulatory mandate and empowerment. This Bill has since been passed in 2013, enabling the formal institutionalisation of the PFRDA as the regulator of the NPS.

The PFRDA can now take on the task of both the relatively short term agenda of closing the gap between the current implementation and what was visualised in the original design. This includes building trust in the system by improving the transparency and visibility of fund accumulations for contributor members and the overall system; enabling a richer choice of investments available to individual members; and resolving inconsistencies in tax treatment.

Another area which the PFRDA can take forward is to initiate the policy thinking and research analysis for the medium and long-term objectives of sound policy and regulation for annuities, and to design the regulatory framework to improve the NPS customer rights.

With these actions, India can get back on the track to achieve a pension system with universal coverage that was visualised in the OASIS reforms of 1998.

Author: Renuka Sane

Home page.

On this blog:

• Regulating the regulators: Assessing regulation-making frameworks in India's financial sector, 4 September 2026.
• Supervising what you cannot inspect, 24 July 2026.
• Market Reaction to Insider Trading: Evidence from Regulatory Orders in India, 11 May 2026.
• What happens when arbitration deadlines are missed, 2 April 2026.
• Evaluating India's Energy Ambitions: Evidence from Electricity Generation Project-Level Data, 1 April 2026.
• Comments on the Securities Market Code Bill, 2025, 1 April 2026.
• An Analysis of Electricity Outages in Delhi: 2024-25, 6 December 2025.
• Anchor pension policy to its core design principles, 12 November 2025.
• A Review of Outage Reporting by Indian DISCOMs, 25 September 2025.
• Powering AI with Reliable Grids and Networks, 1 September 2025.
• Dealing with fraud in consumer finance, 1 August 2025.
• Examining the performance of ERCs at APTEL, 27 July 2025.
• Prepaid Payment Instruments: How has regulation impacted market outcomes?, 6 May 2025.
• Improving legal transparency at the RBI, 25 April 2025.
• Balancing Power and Accountability: An Evaluation of SEBI's Adjudication of Insider Trading, 2 April 2025.
• Pumped storage plants in India: assessing policies and progress, 20 March 2025.
• Electricity reforms in the economic strategy of Tamil Nadu, 7 March 2025.
• Improving electricity regulation in Tamil Nadu, 9 February 2025.
• The exercise of discretionary powers: The case of debarment and restraint from capital markets, 20 July 2024.
• The usefulness of the CMIE household survey data for electricity research in India, 8 May 2024.
• Concerns about recent developments on SEBI's regulation-making on market rumours and insider trading, 6 May 2024.
• Assessing regulatory capability in Tamil Nadu electricity regulation: Evidence from appeals, 26 April 2024.
• The electricity chokepoint in Tamil Nadu public finance, 26 February 2024.
• Solarisation in agriculture in Tamil Nadu, 15 January 2024.
• Offshore wind in Tamil Nadu: from potential to reality, 13 January 2024.
• Evaluating capital market responses to cybersecurity incidents in Indian listed companies, 10 January 2024.

• Reducing challenges to arbitration awards: lessons from court data, 26 Octobe 2023.
• Lost in Translation: Legislative Drafting and Judicial Discretion, 7 May 2023.
• The place of short selling in the financial markets, 18 April 2023.
• Revising the Information Technology Act, 2000, 4 April 2023.
• Examining grievances and redress for pension products, 19 January 2023.
• Coping with stress: Household borrowing for debt repayment, 11 January 2023.

• Examining grievances and redress for banking products, 28 December 2022.
• Reconsidering SEBI disgorgement, 15 June 2022.
• Consumer Grievance Redress in Indian Financial Markets, 14 May 2022.
• History of disinvestment in India, 21 March 2022.
• Does financial and macro policy explain household investment in gold?, 24 January 2022.

• Distribution of self-reported health in India: The role of income and geography, 30 September 2021.
• What year in the history of an advanced economy is like India today?, 25 August 2021
• An analysis of the SEBI WhatsApp Orders: Some observations on regulation-making and adjudication, 27 May 2021
• Should consumers be restricted from storing their card data on the internet?, 26 May 2021
• Vaccination in India: how will demand change when persons above age 18 are eligible?, 27 April 2021
• Analysing India's KYC Framework: Can We Do Things Better?, 13 April 2021
• Towards better enforcement by regulatory agencies in India, 25 March 2021
• Grievance Redress by Courts in Consumer Finance Disputes, 23 March 2021
• Grievance Redress in the Financial Sector in India: Lessons from the field, 26 Februy 2021

• The problem of minimum public shareholding in public sector enterprises, 18 November 2020
• Get by with a little help from my friends (and shopkeepers): Household borrowing in response to Covid 19 , 16 November 2020
• Response to the Consultation Whitepaper on 'Strategy for National Open Digital Ecosystems (NODEs)', 12 July 2020
• Disinvestment of CPSEs in the last 6 years: Resources raised and change in government equity, 7 July 2020
• Estimating customer complaints using Twitter feeds , 13 May 2020
• Holding their breath: Indian firms in an interruption of revenue, 3 April 2020
• Isolation : A weak link in Indian public health, 29 March 2020
• Applicability of the IBC to public sector enterprises: The case of Hindustan Antibiotics Ltd, 18 February 2020

• Chennai 2015: A novel approach to measuring the impact of a natural disaster, 24 December 2019
• Elements of the low Indian labour force participation rate: The elderly, 31 October 2019
• Household debt over time, 24 May 2019
• The Indian bankruptcy reform: old defaults vs. recent ones, 11 April 2019
• Delays in deposit insurance, 9 April 2019
• Estimates of household debt in India, 29 March 2019
• Disclosures in privacy policies: Does 'notice and consent' work?, 19 February 2019
• A Maximalist Approach to Data from the IBC , 16 January 2019

• Runs on mutual funds, 12 October 2018. 
• Discrepancies in the measurement of household saving, 23 July 2018. 
• Experimentation that fosters fintech innovation in India, 18 March 2018. 
• Loan waivers as fresh start in bankruptcy, 12 March 2018. 
• Towards a data protection framework for India, 19 February 2018. 
• PenCalc: A tool for simulating pension outcomes, 25 January 2018. 

• Estimating the potential number of personal insolvency cases at the DRT, 1 December 2017. 
• Don't rush to ban promoters from the IBC process, 17 November 2017. 
• Regulating consumer finance: Do disclosures matter? The case of life insurance, 13 November 2017. 
• The accountability framework of UIDAI: Concerns and solutions, 20 August 2017. 
• Implementing loan waivers: Lessons from the 2008 All India Debt Waiver Scheme experience, 21 July 2017. 
• Issues with the regulation of Information Utilities, 12 July 2017. 
• Grievance redress and enforcement problems in the Aadhaar legal framework, 5 May 2017. 
• Emerging themes around privacy and data protection, 12 April 2017. 
• Is Aadhaar grounded in adequate law and regulations?, 22 March 2017. 
• The size of personal bank credit in India, 7 March 2017. 
• Should we be uploading FIRs on the internet?, 6 January 2017. 

• Designing the payout phase of the National Pension System, 8 December 2016. 
• SEBI's proposals on advisors and distributors, 22 November 2016.
• Direct participation in the Indian equity market: First estimates of some basic facts, 11 November 2016.
• Towards a privacy framework for India in the age of the internet, 2 November 2016.
• The Diwali effect in Delhi air quality, 28 October 2016.
• Household finance in India: The state of the art, 2016, 16 October 2016.
• Describing Delhi's air quality crisis, 13 October 2016.
• How can financial regulators combat mis-selling? Five solutions, 20 August 2016.
• Banks are unfair in their role as financial advisors / distributors, 13 August 2016.
• Privacy concerns in the Aadhaar Act, 2016, 21 July 2016. 
• Survey based measurement of the criminal justice system, 27 May 2016.
• Understanding judicial delays in India: Evidence from Debt Recovery Tribunals, 18 May 2016. 
• Analysing the Information Technology Act (2000) from the viewpoint of protection of privacy, 18 March 2016
• Elements for the proposed privacy law, 9 March 2016.
• Protecting citizens from the State: The case for a privacy law, 16 February 2016.
• Draft IRDAI regulations on insurance commissions: Going back to the beginning, 30 January 2016. 
• Concerns about compliance with IRDAI regulations by insurance companies, 28 January 2016.

• Personal insolvency: Lessons from the UK and Australia, 28 December 2015.
  
• Treatment of individual credit in the draft Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 5 December 2015.
  
• Setting up the ecosystem for personal credit, 21 November 2015.
• What is the cost of one-rank-one-pension?, 7 July 2015
• Voluntary participation in the National Pension System: What does the evidence show?, 16 May 2015.
  
• Concerns about Atal Pension Yojana, 5 May 2015.

• Policy puzzles of the digital nirvana, 19 December 2014.
• Elections in Maharashtra: Have the fires of nativism subsided?, 18 October 2014.
• How to strengthen the National Pension System, 9 October 2014.
• Consumer protection in Indian finance: Going from ideas to action, 27 August 2014.
• Difficulties with PFRDA's draft Aggregator regulations, 2014, 2 July 2014.

• What ails the police?, 12 May 2013.
• Mis-selling: From impressions to evidence, 30 April 2013.