Sources of delays in Indian courts; Industrial policy surrounding `prepaid payment instruments’; announcements; episodes
Sources of delays in Indian courts
Everyone agrees that cases in courts in India take too long. Simple intensification involving more judges is often proposed as the answer. As with any process improvement, detailed research is required in order to understand the chokepoints so as to address them.
An important article in this field came out on The Leap Blog on 12 June: Get them to the court on time: bumps in the road to justice by Mugdha Mohapatra, Siddarth Raman and Susan Thomas. They construct a novel dataset on the sources of delay in Indian courts and offer new insights on what is going wrong. They find that in many cases, the pre-trial stage, which involves serving notices and ensuring appearance, can take up to a year, while the actual trial is much shorter. They suggest that focusing on improving administrative processes, such as digital summons and better police-court coordination, could significantly reduce case backlogs and improve the efficiency of the justice system. This work, which forms part of the XKDR Forum legal systems research program, is an example of the payoffs from constructing a high quality legal systems database and subjecting it to careful statistical analysis.
Industrial policy surrounding `prepaid payment instruments’
The field of payments in India is the site of important industrial policy [EiE Ep89 Industrial policy] interventions. On 6 May, Amol Kulkarni and Renuka Sane published Prepaid Payment Instruments: How has regulation impacted market outcomes? on The Leap Blog.
They examine the influence of RBI regulations on Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPIs). Regulatory changes introduced in 2017, such as stricter transaction limits and higher net worth requirements, disproportionately impacted non-bank PPIs. This led to a decline in PPI transaction volumes and the number of operators, while the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) gained momentum. They conclude that these regulations, despite later revisions, significantly hindered the growth and competitiveness of the PPI market, underscoring the need for careful consideration of regulatory impacts.
This research richly interconnects with previous work: Economic Development and Digital Transformation: Learning from the experience of Aadhaar and Financial Inclusion in India, Suyash Rai, XKDR Forum Working Paper 35, December 2024.
Announcements
IIHS University has unveiled four Masters programs and a PhD program.
Episodes
Everything is Everything with Amit Varma, has episodes:
97 The light in winter (about great masters in Spanish art)
100 Ask me anything #2 (the first AMA was Ep50)
101 Complexity metrics in state intervention
102 ,103 You should start a business (part1, part2)
104 What ails Indian manufacturing? Two years gone. The next episode, Ep105, which will come out next friday, is going to be about the place of manufacturing in economic growth.