Articles by Kala Seetharam Sridhar

This article focuses on air and water pollution in India's cities, provides empirical evidence to demonstrate the seriousness of the challenges, discusses the relevant policies of national and local governments that are used to address the challenges, and presents relevant political economy issues related to introducing pollution taxes or other policies aimed at building green cities.

Given the importance of urban public services in attracting firm location, increasing employment and facilitating economic growth, this paper takes up Ludhiana as a case study as to whether there is a need for reforming public service delivery when judged against national benchmarks and if there is a relationship between the city's financial performance and its delivery of urban services. The paper finds that user charges do not adequately cover the production costs of supplying water or expenditure on sewerage. The bottlenecks to reforming public service delivery are financial and institutional, as they pertain to existing arrangements for water and sewerage. Possible reform actions to improve service delivery are changes in institutional arrangements for delivery, privatisation, and citizen participation.

This paper evaluates the District Primary Education Programme interventions in two DPEP Phase I districts of Madhya Pradesh by using one of them as the control group. It aims to assess the progress made towards achieving the overall goals of DPEP, namely, providing access to primary education for out-of-school children and increasing the retention rate. It also assesses the extent to which gender disparities and differences between social groups such as scheduled castes and tribes and others have been reduced in respect of enrolment, dropout rates and learning achievement. In some instances, especially when outcomes across low and high literacy districts are studied, DPEP appears to have positively facilitated interventions in districts that started off with low female literacy rates. Also, interventions to facilitate access to schooling and to ensure social equity appear to have had an impact.

The decisions of successive Nobel committees seem to confirm that economics is an inexact science and it is best that we 'triangulate' our findings from a certain method with those from other techniques.