The economics of the MGNREGS

 

Ten years after it was launched, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which promises 100 days of employment to every rural household, is back in the news. More people in rural India are seeking employment through the programme across the country, with job numbers scaling a five-year peak.

Although the MGNREGS seems to be reaching many more rural households than before, urban opinion on the programme is sharply divided, both in the mainstream and social media. Even the Narendra Modi government seems divided on the programme, with the ministry of rural development declaring that the 10th anniversary of the programme was a matter of “national pride” barely a year after Modi had derided the programme as a ditch-digging exercise on the floor of Parliament.

Academic opinion on the MGNREGS, however, appears far more favourable than is evident from the public discourse on the issue. A growing body of research on the MGNREGS suggests that it has helped dent poverty, reduced distress migration and raised the bargaining power of rural labourers, especially among lower castes and women, the biggest beneficiaries of the programme.

The latest UN Development Programme report on human development hailed the programme as a “milestone”, which had raised living standards of the poorest of households by offering them a safety net. In a 2014 paper analysing the impact of the programme, economists Stefan Klonner and Christian Oldiges of the University of Heidelberg found that it had reduced poverty by almost half during the agricultural lean season, by helping smoothen seasonal spikes in the consumption of the poorest families.

Using a different data set and a different methodology, a study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) found that the MGNREGS “has reduced poverty overall by up to 32% and has prevented 14 million people from falling into poverty”.

One of the chief attractions of the scheme, according to economists, is the self-selection mechanism of choosing beneficiaries. As Pranab Bardhan, emeritus professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out in an interview to Mint about a year ago, the MGNREGS is effectively a conditional cash-transfer programme.

The condition is that the beneficiary has to work manually, which immediately rules out the rich and the middle class. And in the absence of credible data on poor households, this mechanism seems to be effective in reaching those who need it the most. As the ministry’s press release pointed out, the proportion of scheduled castes and tribes (SCs and STs) among those the programme has reached is greater than their share in the overall population of India.

The MGNREGS has been instrumental in providing a safety net to the poor because it “attracts mainly poor and vulnerable people such as agricultural wage labourers, scheduled tribes, scheduled castes and small, marginal farmers”, the NCAER report pointed out.

Given that the key objective of the programme was to provide livelihood security (especially during the agricultural lean season) and thereby act as a safety net for the poor, it seems to have met that goal.

Nonetheless, the programme continues to face four main criticisms:

1. It is not actually a demand-driven programme, and its success depends on the willingness of the respective state governments and local bodies.

2. It has failed to create durable assets in rural areas.

3. It has contributed significantly to wage growth and stoked the fires of inflation.

4. It has led to a massive leakage of public resources, and led to unintended consequences in rural areas such as on educational outcomes.

The first point is perhaps the most potent among the main criticisms of the programme. Although it was launched as a demand-driven “workfare” programme, in reality, the MGNREGS remains supply-driven with its reach and impact determined by central, state and local government functionaries, and varying widely across states.

Research by Deepta Chopra of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, shows that it is the government’s inability or rather unwillingness to award jobs under the MGNREGS that has led to the decline of the programme in Rajasthan.

In Rajasthan, the early success of the programme turned out to be its biggest weakness, Chopra argues. She points out that the involvement of grassroots organizations in the implementation of the programme threatened local power brokers, who resented the inability to award jobs according to their discretion.

This led them to sabotage the process of demand-driven work schemes, and the frontline workers charged with accepting applications for work refused to accept them.

Economists Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay of the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, Himanshu of Jawaharlal Nehru University and M.R. Sharan of Harvard University ound significant rationing of work by village headmen in Rajasthan. In many villages, people did not demand work because they were told that “they can request work only when it is available”.

Supply-side issues in the MGNREGS are so important that a group of World Bank economists found that even after mitigating the information asymmetry, participation may not increase. Martin Ravallion and others of the World Bank ran a randomized experiment in Bihar, where they showed a group of villagers an informative video about the MGNREGS.

While the perception of the programme certainly improved among those who viewed the video, the impact on seeking and finding work through the programme remain modest.

Given the supply-side nature of the programme, better-functioning states such as those in south India have made better use of the programme and received more funds compared to poorer northern states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, an analysis by former bureaucrat N.C. Saxena shows. Saxena suggests that pre-fixing state-wise MGNREGS allocations based on need would have been far more equitable.

While creating durable assets was not the main objective of the programme, it became a key aim in later years, and led to convergence with other schemes. The evidence on this count is mixed, but the perception that it has just been an empty ditch-digging exercise may be an urban myth.

While there are anecdotal examples of poor assets created under the programme, there is no systematic evidence suggesting that most or even a majority of the assets are useless. A 2014 study by a team led by economist Sudha Narayanan of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) shows that most assets recorded under the programme in Maharashtra exist in reality and not just on paper.

Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of rural households surveyed found the assets created under the programme such as bunds, ponds, embankments, etc., to be useful for them. Seventy-five per cent of the assets created are directly or indirectly linked to agriculture, the study found.

Another criticism that has been prevalent is that MGNREGS wages increase agricultural wages and, hence, the cost of cultivation rises, which has inflationary effects. In a 2012 paper, Mehtabul Azam of Oklahoma State University analysed the impact of the MGNREGS and found that the programme drove up wages of casual female labour by 8%.

However, this is indicative of a reduction in the gender-wage gap in India’s labour market more than of a wage-inflation spiral. There is very little macroeconomic evidence to suggest that the MGNREGS has been a key driver of inflation. A 2014 Reserve Bank of India report suggests that MGNREGS may not have had any significant impact on food inflation.

A new paper by Manisha Shah of UCLA and Bryce Steinberg of Brown University argues that the MGNREGS has undesirable effects on educational outcomes, particularly for adolescents. Using the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) survey data, the duo finds that children in districts with more MGNREGS exposure perform worse in math, and are more likely to drop out of school.

“We examine the effect of MGNREGS, one of the largest workfare programmes in the world, on human capital investment. Since MGNREGS increases labour demand, it could increase the opportunity cost of schooling, lowering human capital investment even as incomes increase. Using a household survey of test scores and schooling outcomes for approximately 2.5 million rural children in India, we show that each year of exposure to MGNREGS decreases school enrolment by 2 percentage points and math scores by 2% of a standard deviation amongst children aged 13-16. In addition, while the impacts of MGNREGS on human capital are similar for boys and girls, adolescent boys are primarily substituting into market work when they leave school while adolescent girls are substituting into unpaid domestic work.”

However, the negative effects of older children dropping out of school could be compensated for by the greater investment made on younger children in participating households. In a forthcoming paper in the IZA Journal of Labour & Development, economists Farzana Afridi, Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay and Soham Sahoo of the Indian Statistical Institute show that a mother’s participation in the MGNREGS not only raises the odds of the child attending school but is also associated with better academic performance.

The issue of corruption is not unique to the MGNREGS but afflicts most state-run programmes, including those that provide for health or infrastructure. As Bardhan pointed out, the leakages from the MGNREGS are a small fraction of the subsidies to the better-off sections of society, and it is, therefore, important not to lose a sense of proportion in evaluating the programme.

A fundamental issue that plagues all well-intentioned public programmes is the lack of state capacity or political commitment to implement it effectively. So far, the focus has been on building state capacity through technocratic solutions (biometric payment systems, for instance).

The evidence on automated payment systems has been mixed. In Andhra Pradesh, a smart card-based payment system has been found to have reduced the problems of delayed payments and helped plug leakages.

Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California, San Diego, who along with his colleagues conducted the experiment on smart card payments for MGNREGS wages in Andhra Pradesh found that “despite the incomplete implementation, beneficiaries in carded mandals experienced a faster, more reliable, and less corrupt payment experience. The smart card system reduced the lag between working on an MGNREGS project and collecting payment by 29%, and reduced the unpredictability in the lag by 39%. Further, it reduced by 19% the time workers spent collecting MGNREGS payments.”

While the Andhra Pradesh experiment has been hailed as a success, news from Chhattisgarh, another state that has done well in the implementation of the MGNREGS, does not bode well for biometric payments. Supriya Sharma of Scroll noted that the Aadhaar-based payment system is facing problems in Chhattisgarh, with many enrolment centres charging bribes while enrolling people.

In summary, the MGNREGS program seems to have been reasonably successful in meeting its goals. It may not have single-handedly transformed rural India, but then it was never meant to do that. It was meant to be a safety net for the poorest and most marginalized sections of society, whose incomes went through sharp fluctuations across seasons.

Although it suffers from implementation challenges and leakages, the MGNREGS has reached the target population more effectively than most other government schemes.

This is not to deny that the programme needs reforms to perform better. While better use of technology can solve certain problems, they are not adequate to fix design bugs or issues of political accountability for the programme.

Given the regional imbalances in fund allocation for the programme, it may be worth considering allocating resources to states and districts that require this programme the most, based on the levels of poverty and exposure to drought, as Saxena argues.

It may also be worthwhile to decentralize decision-making on the implementation of the scheme once the allocation is based on a fair and transparent criterion.

Rather than micromanage each aspect of the programme, the central government should perhaps focus more on monitoring key outcomes such as generation of employment and assets, and on publicizing data relating to these aspects to make states and local bodies accountable for the funds they receive.

how to improve primary education

Each week, we ask people working in the field of public policy what they would do if they were given a billion dollars to spend on projects. What policy initiatives would they fund, and how would they spend this money?

This week, we spoke to Osama Manzar, founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation.

If you have your own billion-dollar plan, send it to mintonsunday@livemint.com. Selected entries will be published online.

Here. Take a billion dollars. So, is that enough money to do anything substantial in public policy in India? Why or why not?

Actually, public policy does not need money. If we want any new public policy, we need sustained advocacy after having identified the public issue, and provide policy options. If there is an existing public policy that needs meticulous implementation then, yes, a financial allocation can be used to partly fund the entire implementation in a particular area or a region or a state.

Incidentally, in India, there are several public policies and they often suffer from bad planning and implementation to make an adequate impact. For example, take the case of Right To Information (RTI). It is a great public policy and it is also something extremely desired and people-driven, yet it has been suffering challenges of adequate implementation.

On the one hand, RTI hasn’t even reached the last woman in a village—beneficiaries of RTI applications is estimated at barely 8 million citizens a year. At the same time, governments and the bureaucracy have relentlessly complained about too many “undesirable RTI applications”.

Another public policy that really bothers me a lot for not having been meticulously implemented is right to education (RTE). If I have a chance to look at just one policy and one area of public good that must not be compromised, I would choose 1.4 million government schools in India and ensure they deliver what they are meant for.

Coming to what a billion dollars can do for a chosen public policy. Let me start by looking at what $1 billion means to India. A billion is a 100 crore, which is the population that is yet to be connected to the Internet. A 100 crore dollars converted into Indian currency would somewhere around Rs6,500 crore. Interestingly, if I want this money to be used for connecting the unconnected India, I will have just a dollar, or about Rs65, per person to connect them. Which is not a lot.

However, if I choose to use it for the purpose of RTE, it gives me just about Rs46,000 per school to make all the changes that is desired. So, then the issue is what can Rs46,000 do for a school in a village in India?

What are some areas of public policy that you really care about? Feel free to go as micro as you want.

The one public good that I care about is education. Not because I love education or the system of education, or because I have some extraordinary love for the educational institutions of the country, but because education is the only institutional good that works at the society and community level when people are in their infancy.

I consider the school as a public good. In fact, I consider the most important public good, an unparalleled institution that needs to be looked at to make it work not just as a K12 system but as tutelage for the harmonic growth of the country.

So, what is your billion-dollar public policy idea? Why is it important?

We have about 1.4 million schools in India. This public service more or less employs about 7 million teachers. In fact, ideally, the number of teachers should not be less than 10 million. This public good also provides a public space, tools for education and even food to the children and teachers for at least one meal a day.

Yet, after almost seven decades, we have not been able to make sure that:

• all teachers attend schools regularly

• all children attend schools

• all children complete the full cycle of school

• all teachers certainly teach

• all schools are functional and have everything that has been promised

It is important to note that this is not so much an issue of inadequate public policy as much as one of accountability and a lack of responsibility among stakeholders.

So, my billion-dollar idea is to provide each and every teacher in a government school in India a smartphone enabled with a mandatory app. Let’s call the app Ustaad.

Broadly, what can a billion dollars do for this particular area?

As I mentioned earlier, considering that we have a billion dollars to spend that comes to about Rs46,000 per school of the 1.4 million in the country. It is important that the idea of spending this money must be one-time and not recurring and that it must build a sustainable ecosystem. According to me, broadly, this financial assistance should go to the following two areas:

• responsibility and accountability of the most important stakeholder—the teachers

• each and every school must necessarily be provided with high-bandwidth Internet connectivity

That is where the app will help. But first, let me elaborate how these two alone would make all the difference that is desirable.

We all know that India’s school dropout rate is extreme. Out of all the enrolments that takes place, more than 39% boys and 33% girls, respectively, drop out even before completing elementary levels of schooling. Apart from the fact that poverty and the need for working hands at home may be a hurdle for children going to school, the bigger questions are:

• Are we making our schools work?

• Are teachers actually present in school and do they deliver their actual responsibility of teaching?

This is where Ustaad comes in. Each teacher with Ustaad will have to use the app to share his/her location along with the following:

• a selfie with the classroom in action as soon you enter the class and when you finish and leave the class

• every time you hold meetings with community

• a photo report of all the necessary infrastructure every week—for example, functional toilets for both girls and boys; availability of drinking water; availability of water in the toilets

• midday meal report for quality, quantity and service

• general periodic reporting

Just the regular and accountable presence of the teachers in our schools would make a huge change. However, the use of smartphone and the Ustaad app will have to be made mandatory, qualified by punishment with disincentives for poor use. Gradually, the same smartphone can be used for pushing educational resources and teaching material, making social networks of local stakeholders, etc.

The second part of my idea is connecting each school with high-speed Internet access. This is an extreme necessity as a very low-cost and high-impact infrastructural need of an educational system.

The government already has plans to provide Internet connectivity up to the panchayat level. All I need to do is spend the extra needed to connect this high-speed Internet from the panchayat node to the government school.

Now, give us a sense of how you will spend this money? Be specific if possible.

I would propose to spend money for two ideas:

• First, there is the cost of 7 million mobile handsets for as many teachers. Assuming each at the rate of Rs4,000, that is Rs2,800 crore.

• The rest is plenty for connecting school to panchayat node, ongoing maintenance and management of data, server, app, user support, upgradation and so on.

What outcomes do you hope to see?

The outcomes would be very clearly many, in particular the following:

• teachers would be present in schools

• teachers would spend time in classrooms

• children would be more motivated to go to school

• classroom presence will increase

• dropouts will decrease

• quality of education will become better

• presence of absolute poor children in schools will increase

• larger number of schools will become RTI compliant

• girls’ presence in schools will increase

What if I gave you another billion? Would you keep spending it here?

Yes. I will make use the additional billion to make each and every school wireless Internet enabled and an Internet hub for surrounding communities.

And finally, what if you had to just spend in on yourself? (Be decent.)

I will adopt about 100 villages in different parts of the country and work on holistic development plans. The idea will be to create ‘smart villages’ where people have gainful things to do besides migrate

ALL QUESTION PAPERS of UKPCS -2012 MAINS

ALL QUESTION PAPERS of UKPCS -2012 MAINS

Language

History Of India, National Movement Society & Culture

Indian Polity, Social Justice & International Relation

Geography Of India & World

Economic & Social Development

General Science & Technology

General Aptitude And Ethics

ALL QUESTION PAPERS of UKPCS -2012 MAINS

Language
History Of India, National Movement Society & Culture
Indian Polity, Social Justice & International Relation
Geography Of India & World
Economic & Social Development
General Science & Technology
General Aptitude And Ethics
- See more at: http://samvegias.com/2016/02/07/all-question-papers-of-ukpcs-2012-mains/#sthash.T7sSqii0.dpuf

ALL QUESTION PAPERS of UKPCS -2012 MAINS

Language
History Of India, National Movement Society & Culture
Indian Polity, Social Justice & International Relation
Geography Of India & World
Economic & Social Development
General Science & Technology
General Aptitude And Ethics

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- See more at: http://samvegias.com/2016/02/07/all-question-papers-of-ukpcs-2012-mains/#sthash.T7sSqii0.dpuf

Are we neglecting India’s rich marine biodiversity?

In India, while our conservation policies are geared towards terrestrial biodiversity, there are many marine species that are not protected

A short visit to San Francisco got me thinking about the way we look at marine biodiversity in India. Along with the Golden Gate bridge and Alcatraz island, one of the most iconic attractions of this lovely coastal city is a handful of loud smelly creatures that have tourists enthralled on a daily basis.

On my jaunts around the city I found myself gravitating to Pier 39. Here, a colony of sea lions has made the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf its home since 1989. The subject of much scientific study and research, no one is quite clear why the sea lions arrived in this particular area or why they continue to live here.

Shortly after an earthquake hit San Francisco back in 1989, the sea lions began taking up residence at the pier and forming a colony and soon they became part of the city’s landscape.

Over the years, the city has learnt to celebrate its sea lions. And now there is an interpretation centre devoted to the sea lions right above the pier that educates children and adults about the difference between seals and sea lions, their relevance to marine biodiversity and the story of Pier 39. All this as you hear the loud lazy animals grunting and barking right below.

Of course the sea lions weren’t always welcome guests. The boat owners were not too happy about having to avoid the sea lions in order to reach their boats. Ultimately, for the safety of the boat owners, it was decided to leave the dock to the sea lions. Boat owners who owned dock slips were relocated elsewhere in the Pier 39 marina.

The weight of the sea lions—running into thousands of pounds—caused the K-Dock area to submerge, become waterlogged and eventually fall apart. In an attempt to repair the dock, floats were built on which the animals could rest, indicating just how the animals had won the hearts of the locals.

The Marine Mammal Center’s biologists believe that the sea lions have chosen to inhabit Pier 39’s dock because there’s plenty of food nearby in the bay and the absence of natural predators keeps them safe. Also, the docks are easier to haul out on, more comfortable and more protected from storms than a rocky beach.

But the naturalists studying the sea lions have observed that in spite of the protective environment, the number of animals visiting this part of the Bay area has declined; it is speculated that the impact of climate change could be disrupting their natural migratory cycles. Along with this, plastic in the oceans is another big threat; quite often, sea lions get entangled in packing nets or fish nets and need to be rescued.

Not far from the sea lion centre is the San Francisco Aquarium Of The Bay with its collection of all the local marine wildlife on display. With a touch pool for kids and a walk-through where you can experience leopard sharks swimming above your head, the aquarium makes you look at the marine world in childlike wonder. The centres play an important role in educating people about the local biodiversity and the need to conserve them.

As I walked around the Bay area, I realized there is so little we know about marine diversity back in India. In fact, there are very few conservation education centres that celebrate or educate us about life in the oceans. This, in spite of the fact that we have over 7,000km of coastline and 12,000 species spread across different taxa from crustaceans to birds to reptiles and mammals.

Two incidents that happened in the past one month indicate just how deep our ignorance of the marine world runs. In January, as many as 90 short-finned pilot whales were washed ashore, on the coast of Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu. While some attempts were made to push the beached whales back into the water, eventually at least 45 succumbed. Scientists are still not clear about what exactly happened that caused these animals to die en masse. In another incident, a 30 feet-long whale got beached at Juhu, near Mumbai. While stranding of whales is not uncommon, mass beaching continues to baffle scientists even now.

The next crisis facing the natural world will be in our oceans and seas. According to a report released by the World Economic Forum in January 2016, there will be more plastic in the sea in 2050 than fish. Already fishermen across India report a decline in catches—both in terms of quality and quantity—which should be a cause for concern.

In India, while our conservation policies are geared towards terrestrial biodiversity, there are many marine species that are not protected. And the crisis facing our seas will affect not just tiny creatures, but thousands of fishermen who live off it. I left California with a love for sea lions and a firm resolution to get to know the marine biodiversity back in my own country a bit better

Removing constraints in higher education The argument that foreign investment benefits only a minority is flawed

Removing constraints in higher education

The argument that foreign investment benefits only a minority is flawed

The Global Education Meet (GEM), which was convened in Kerala last week, caught the headlines for the wrong reasons. At the venue of the meet, Students’ Federation of India (SFI) activists assaulted the vice-chairman of the state’s higher education council, T.P. Sreenivasan. The motive: To prevent acceleration of ‘commercialization’ of education.

The resistance to privatizing education and foreign investment is often based on two flawed assumptions. First, privatization inevitably leads to profiteering and compromises education, and second, public institutions always do a better job.

While the merits of GEM’s specific approach of establishing International Higher Education Zones—a kind of special education zone—are debateable, the fundamental clash of ideas on display in Kerala is telling. The protesters claimed that inviting foreign investment and foreign universities to Kerala would facilitate a “global trade in education” and would be pointless as this would benefit only a minority of students. These arguments are both atavistic—pointing to a belief in an isolated, idealized form of egalitarianism that is unworkable in practice—and indicative of the manner in which those flawed assumptions can lead people to ignore the experiences of the countries that dominate higher education globally.

The establishment of big universities with state-of-the-art facilities may not serve the purpose of educating and training every one of the multitude of India’s youth. But they raise the bar by creating healthy competition. And they have beneficial spillover effects. They can lead to establishment of enterprises, which thrive from the human resources in the given area and potentially drive the entire city’s urban growth, provided it is integrated with the city and not walled off from it. Silicon Valley benefiting from Stanford academia and Boston from Harvard and MIT are cases in point.

The structural issues inherent in India’s current higher education system—walled off for decades—are the reason for the demand-supply gap in its skill market. Private institutions account for almost two-thirds of the higher education in India (according to a 2011 report by Ernst and Young and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry). Some of them even provide the finest education in the country. Despite this, barriers are present at every level for these institutions—entry, operation and exit.

Private universities and deemed universities currently have no power to affiliate colleges, fix salaries of their faculty or even include courses in their colleges. This privilege lies entirely in the hand of the state or central university. The control of these universities, in turn, lies in the hands of the University Grants Commission (UGC), the professional councils and the government (centre and state).

Restrictions also exist on entry of foreign universities, foreign faculty and foreign collaboration. Though 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) is allowed in the education sector, the provision comes with riders. Not-for-profit principle and permitting only Section 25 companies with no foreign investment to invest in technical institutes are just a few of them. If these bottlenecks do not scare away interested foreign institutes, they can engage in exchange programmes, distance education and faculty exchange programmes with existing Indian institutes.

If India has to accommodate its rising need for higher education, granting autonomy to private institutions, liberalizing laws for foreign entrants and decentralization are a necessity and not a leisurely choice.

According to World Economic Forum’s latest report The Future of Jobs, 65% of current primary schoolchildren will end up working in completely new jobs that do not exist yet. An evolving dynamic course structure should be framed through a symbiotic association with both private and foreign partners if India has to keep pace with the world of nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics and space research.

Research has to form an essential part of the curriculum and be linked with the industry’s requirements. The Digital India fund set aside for education may be effectively used for complementing these objectives through information and communication technology (ICT) and massive open online courses (MOOCs).

With half the population of India falling below the age of 29 and the age distribution chart swelling up considerably after 15 years, there is no better time to look at and revive the higher education sector in India. The land of Nalanda, Vikramasila and Taxila, which featured vividly in the accounts of travellers like Hsuan Tsang, I. Tsing and Strabo, currently has no varsity in the world’s top 100 ranking. Higher education in India needs more than just reform. It requires a revolution.

Will private and foreign entrants help in reviving the higher education system in India? 

India ratifies key international convention on nuclear accident compensation

India ratifies key international convention on nuclear accident compensation

The ratification makes India part of a global legal regime that has established a standard for compensation of victims in the event of a nuclear accident

Clearing the decks for US and other foreign companies to invest in its potentially vast nuclear energy market, India ratified an international convention on nuclear energy accident liability, seen as the final piece in its efforts to address a major concern of foreign nuclear suppliers.

Clearing the decks for US and other foreign companies to invest in its potentially vast nuclear energy market, India ratified an international convention on nuclear energy accident liability, seen as the final piece in its efforts to address a major concern of foreign nuclear suppliers.

A statement from the Indian foreign ministry late on Thursday said India has submitted the Instrument of Ratification of the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC) for Nuclear Damage to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This makes India part of a global legal regime that has established a standard for compensation of victims in the event of a nuclear accident.

Ambassador and permanent representative of India to the United Nations (Vienna), Rajiva Misra, handed over the Instrument of Ratification to acting director general of IAEA Juan Carlos Lentijo in Vienna on Thursday, a statement said.

International nuclear reactor makers such as General Electric have been reluctant to set up plants in India because of a 2010 domestic liability law that makes equipment suppliers accountable for accidents and not the plant operators, as is the global norm.

Last year, India launched an insurance pool with a liability cap of Rs.1,500 crore ($225 million) to cover the suppliers’ risk of potential liability.

“This marks a conclusive step in the addressing of issues related to civil nuclear liability in India,” the foreign ministry said after the document was handed to IAEA in Vienna.

India has signed a preliminary “early works agreement” with US equipment manufacturer Westinghouse Electric Co. Llc in 2013, following the conclusion of the landmark India-US nuclear agreement in 2008 that gave India the opportunity to enter the global nuclear scene after a gap of 34 years. But no US company has been willing to invest in India’s nuclear power market for fear of the liability clause in its domestic law.

India has plans to construct many nuclear power plants to fuel its economic growth. The size of the Indian nuclear power market is estimated at $150 billion by various accounts.

Russia is building six reactors in southern India and is in talks for another six.

During the just concluded visit by French president Francois Hollande, India and France signed a reworked pact to build six nuclear plants at Jaitapur in Mahararashtra.

Reveal answer books, interview marks: Supreme Court to PSCs

The Supreme Court ruling asking two public service commissions to disclose answer papers and marks obtained during interview may set a precedent for the touch-me-not Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) that selects India’s bureaucracy through competitive exams but suffers from a long-standing criticism of lack of transparency and public scrutiny.

On Thursday, in a landmark judgment, the apex court asked the Kerala Public Service Commission and Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission to disclose answer papers and marks tabulated during the oral interviews.

Also Read:

• Reveal answer books, interview marks: Supreme Court to PSCs

The Supreme Court judgment will go a long way in reposing faith in the system and establish accountability, said Sriram Srirangam, director at Sriram’s IAS, a civil service coaching school. “Civil Service exams conducted by UPSC is one of most high stake exams in the country not just from the point of view of the career of students but also in terms of economic and social policy-making as it’s the bureaucracy that’s runs the county effectively,” he said.

Srirangam said civil service aspirants are always confused about what kind of answers could get them better marks. “When a candidate is preparing for the best career option in the country, he needs to know how he performed in the exam and how his answer papers have been evaluated. “How will an exam conducting body establish transparency and accountability without disclosing answer papers and marks obtained?” he asked.

In the Thursday ruling, the Supreme Court said: “So far as the information sought for by the respondents with regard to the supply of scanned copies of his answer sheet of the written test, copy of the tabulation sheet and other information, we are of the opinion that the view taken in the impugned judgment with regard to the disclosure of these information, does not suffer from error of law and the same is fully justified.”

“Disclosing the marks and the answer sheets to the candidates will ensure that the candidates have been given marks according to their performance in the exam. This practice will ensure fair play in this competitive environment, where a candidate puts his time in preparing for the competitive exams,” the court observed.

Public service commissions both at the Union and state levels have long faced criticism over their refusal to disclose marks obtained in entrance exams for government jobs.

Pramod Kumar, a civil service aspirant in Delhi, said if Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) can disclose the answer papers of joint entrance exam (JEE), why can’t UPSC do the same for civil service exams and other high stake entrance exams that it conducts.

“The long standing demand from the civil service aspirants’ community is for a transparent exam where every candidate knows what he scored and where he faltered. If USPC is in charge of giving country IAS (Indian Administrative Service), IPS (Indian Police Service) and IFS (Indian Foreign Service) officials, then it must operate like a glass house,” Kumar said.

On Thursday, hearing appeals from the Kerala and Uttar Pradesh public service commissions against the decision of the respective high courts, the Supreme Court ruled that such disclosure of answer papers and mark sheets of interviews if asked for “do not suffer from error of law”.