Talk: Something to Complain About: How Minority Representatives Overcome Ethnic Differences 

We study the costs of ethnic differences between local politicians and examine ways tomitigate them. Using data from over 100,000 local politicians in India, we establish – via a regression discontinuity design – that delivery of key public goods suffers when ethnic minority(low-caste) representatives govern under non-minority (high-caste) representatives. We then study an institutional innovation that mitigates these adverse consequences. In our setting,local politicians can file complaints with the higher bureaucracy under a formal complaintstechnology. We establish that low-caste politicians use the technology, filing over twice as many complaints when exogenously paired with high-caste superiors. Does filing complaints improveoutcomes, though? We run a large field experiment involving 1629 low-caste representatives where we randomize offers to file complaints on their behalf. Treated jurisdictions see a 26%rise in public good projects, accounting for 79% of the initial gap in provision, with positive spillovers onto neighboring jurisdictions.

Please find below the registration link:

https://tinyurl.com/y59hepzg

Talk Title: Building a Grievance Redress System: The CFPB Experience

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created after the financial crisis of 2008 to provide a single point of enforcing federal consumer financial laws in the United States. As the primary consumer financial protection authority, the CFPB has amassed enormous experience over the decade in building and implementing a grievance redress system by way of its Consumer Complaints process and integrating it with both financial firms, and consumers, and monitoring the interaction that takes place through the system. This talk will shed light on the inner workings of the Consumer Complaints system. 

Please find below the registration link:  

https://tinyurl.com/y2tw338r

Talk Title: “How have Indian courts dealt with consumer finance disputes? "

This paper studies the role of courts in consumer nance disputes in India. It describes the structure of the courts that consumers can access, such as the consumer courts established under the Consumer Protection Act, 1986 (and now 2019), High Courts and the Supreme Court of India. It finds that in the case of banking disputes, courts have generally sided with the consumer when banks behaved contrary to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circulars. In the case of insurance, courts have taken a pro-industry contractual compliance stance. Hence, consumers did not get a remedy in cases where the contracts had unfair terms. The paper also finds that courts tend to award low compensation, take a long time for adjudication, do not have systems for class action suits, and generally lack specialization to deal with consumer finance issues. All of these are important issues that must be addressed for courts to become more effective in providing relief regarding consumer finance (and other) disputes.

Malavika Raghavan is a lawyer working on inter-disciplinary research in India, focusing on the impacts of digitisation in finance on the lives of lower-income individuals. She currently heads the Future of Finance Initiative at Dvara Research.

Vimal Balasubramaniam is an Assistant Professor at the Queen Mary University of London. His research interests include Household Finance, Behavioural Finance, and Empirical Asset Pricing.

Sunil Abraham is an Ashoka Fellow and Endowed Professor at Artex University of Arts, where his work focuses on digital policy and design practices. He was formerly the Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore/New Delhi, where he worked on issues of accessibility, access to knowledge, internet governance and telecommunications. He is also the Founder and Director of Mahiti, a twenty-year-old social enterprise that aims to reduce the cost and complexity of ICTs for the voluntary sector by using free software. Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network, a project of UNDP’s APDIP, serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region from 2004-2007

Sunil Abraham will give a talk on his paper titled “Unified Payments Interface: Towards Greater Cybersovereignty” (ORF Issue Brief, No. 380, July 2020). The paper analyses India’s experience in setting up the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and outlines lessons that can be emulated by other countries aiming to provide affordable, ubiquitous and quality digital payment services to their public. The paper argues that the interventionist approach and public-private partnerships fostered by the Indian government have paid off, though there are course corrections required to protect the UPI ecosystem.

Webinar Registration: https://forms.gle/bcmnTvVMEwMuNFtx6

Surya Prakash BS is the Programme Director at DAKSH - a civil society organisation which conducts research on judicial performance, and on judicial reform. He has been working in the area of judicial reforms since 2015. Prior to that he worked in large technology MNE’s, where he handled tax related functions. He is a chartered accountant by training, and also holds an LLB from the Karnataka State Law University.

The justice system has made considerable advances in adoption of ICT given the scale of its operation and the large population whose needs it must meet. The design of information systems used by institutions such as the Indian judiciary, lawyers, government departments, police, and prison authorities, does not exploit the full extent of currently commonplace technology, owing to legislative, institutional, and resource constraints. In a recent whitepaper series, DAKSH provides a roadmap for a transformation of the justice system that is not merely technologically oriented, but which sets goals which the process should fulfill, and proposes strategic, technical, legislative courses of action to reach these goals. The speaker - Surya Prakash BS - will present the highlights of these white papers in this seminar.

Speaker profile

Jeff Hammer is currently a principal in “Economists without Borders”, a non-resident Senior Fellow at NCAER, Delhi and the originator of the One Hundred Homes project. From 2008 to 2018 he taught development economics and health policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public andInternational Affairs at Princeton University. From 1982 to 2007 he had been aLead Economist at the World Bank working on issues of public economics and public expenditure, emphasizing service delivery in the social sectors – particularly in health. He was on the core team of the 2003 World Development Report: “MakingServices Work for Poor People” and was at the Resident Mission in Delhi from2004 to 2007, working on improving services through better accountability. Hewas educated at Swarthmore College and has his Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Abstract

“One hundred homes” illustrates with pictures, videos, 360 shots, and family descriptions what people who are the respondents of the standard government surveys look like in real life. It organizes the one hundred visual essays according to the results of a household consumption survey that are used by researchers, statisticians and policy makers to bring out the richness of life under the numbers.

This “visual survey” is the result of a collaboration between journalists, economists, sociologists, photographers, videographers, survey researchers and others.