Foreign equity investment in India: A stall, not a reversal by Sanjuktha Athreya, published on The Leap Blog, 20 August 2026. Fears about a capital flow reversal by foreign portfolio investors are overstated. There’s about $0.8T of foreign portfolio in India and it’s quite resilient. There has not been a quarter in modern Indian history where the net capital outflow by foreign portfolio investors exceeded 3% of their investment in India.

Discretionary power at the CCI

One interesting feature of Indian competition law is Section 26(2) of the Competition Act, 2002, which empowers the Competition Commission of India to close a complaint at the preliminary stage if it determines that no prima facie case of anti-competitive behaviour exists. This allows CCI to dismiss meritless cases and inform the relevant parties without directing a formal, resource-intensive investigation by the Director General.

How well is this implemented under real world limitations of Indian state capability? The article What happens when the CCI decides not to investigate? by Natasha Aggarwal, Amol Kulkarni, Shruti Aji Murali, Bhavin Patel, and Vishnu Suresh, published on The Leap Blog, 16 August 2026, unveils two new working papers on these questions. They bring knowledge from Indian regulatory theory to evaluate a dataset of 111 orders under Section 26(2), and they find these are generally well done. They examine how CCI does resource allocation of scarce investigatory resources and find pathways for improvement.

Land use and public finance

In the financing of cities, land monetisation can be an important element. By capturing some of the land value created by public infrastructure investments, local governments can reduce public expenditure and establish durable revenue sources. But this requires important changes in how Indian city finance works.

In Using Land for Economic Development: India’s Land Problem Is Also a Public-Finance Problem, published on The Leap Blog on 13 August, Anirudh Burman offers a strategic view of this field emphasising the gains from a unified approach to land and public finance. This strategic picture is at once public finance (“resource mobilisation” to some), and land use policy for good cities. The present reliance on compulsory acquisition of land involves state violence, involves delays, and ultimately imposes a high fiscal burden. He shows the gains from alternative land-assembly instruments. Anirudh will build out these ideas into a series of papers in coming months.

Episodes

Anupam Manur of Takshashila Institution is building a show named Turbulence. I did a conversation with him, published on 21 August 2026, on the age of chaos, and pathways to resilience.

Some people like to have a government that tries to have an exchange rate policy. It is important to also reckon with the costs of government management of the exchange rate. These are enumerated in my column in the Business Standard yesterday.

Ashok Desai is the economist who was Chief Economic Advisor in 1991 and wrote the Manmohan Singh speech of July 1991. He once said to me: the organising principle for his generation was trade liberalisation and the decontrol of prices in the real sector, while in my generation the big idea is the power of the price system when applied to the exchange rate.

What impedes foreign investment

The policy community is keenly conscious about the difficulties in the economy on foreign investment. Shubho Roy and I wrote a column in the Business Standard, and then Govindraj Ethiraj made an episode of The Core, on six barriers to foreign investment. We suggest that there is no silver bullet, that there are six fields of work, which require establishing the policy pipeline from evidence, research to policy proposals to solutions.

Measuring GST in firm data (NOT)

When debating a problem like the input tax credit blockages in the Indian GST, a natural instinct is to reach for firm data in order to investigate this further. Atibhi Sharma and I wrote an article on The Leap Blog on 11 August, What do we observe about GST at the firm level? TL;DR We observe nothing. We offer a policy proposal on how firm disclosures should be modified to obtain good data on GST at the firm level.

Episodes

An episode of Kushal Lodha’s show. Please ignore the title.

In my column in the Business Standard last Monday, I argue that the glass is half empty and the glass is half full. There are important aspects in which the UK FTA has improved upon previous Indian work on trade openness. This is progress: the improvements will filter through into improvements in Indian firm productivity and consumer welfare albeit slowly. But when measured against Indian interests, the treaty leaves a lot to be desired.

Banks, AI, regulation

How should regulators see AI deployments in banks? Maninder Singh Juneja and Renuka Sane have an article on 24 July on The Leap Blog, Supervising what you cannot inspect, which engages in first principles reasoning. They argue in favour of process regulation that demands observability, attributability and reversibility. This builds on the previous article by Maninder Singh Juneja from 7 June, Trust in the era of the AI-informed consumer.

Education system, testing

The problem of youth unemployment, and then education, and then testing, run well beyond the implementation of examinations. There is fresh interest in the problems of state-led education in India. Some previous materials that will interest you:

Pritchett, Lant. 2024. “Addressing the Learning Crisis: An Emergent Consensus.”

Kelkar, Vijay, and Ajay Shah. 2024. “Rethinking NEET, and medical education.” Business Standard, July 8, 2024.

Shah, Ajay, and Amit Varma. “A Deep Dive Into Education.” Episode 54 of Everything is Everything. July 5, 2024. Podcast, video, 1:40:26.

Pai, Nitin, and Ajay Shah. 2023. “Doing better than a competitive exam.” Business Standard, August 21, 2023. https://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/MEDIA/2023/iit_jee.html.

Shah, Ajay. 2020. “Carrying the ideas of NEP to execution.” Business Standard, August 9, 2020.

Pritchett, Lant. 2013. The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development.

Shah, Ajay. 2012. “Education in India at the crossroads.” The Leap Blog, January 24, 2012.

Hammer, Jeff. 2012. “Accountability in education.” The Leap Blog, January 18, 2012.

Pritchett, Lant. 2012. “The first PISA results for India: The end of the beginning.” The Leap Blog, January 5, 2012.

Shah, Ajay. 2010. “Geniuses and economic development.” The Leap Blog, September 12, 2010.

Shah, Parth. 2010. “The Right to Education Act: A critique.” The Leap Blog, April 1, 2010.

Shah, Ajay. 2006. “The mess in education.” Business Standard, February 28, 2006.

Pritchett, Lant. 2001. “Where Has All the Education Gone?” The World Bank Economic Review 15 (3): 367–391.

Net FDI in India stagnated from $45 billion in 2015-16 to $41 billion in 2025-26. Many factors are at work: the loss of residence-based taxation, the loss of bilateral investment treaties, the rise of central planning coupled with the decline in the rule of law, and economic nationalism where foreigners feel they are not treated equally.

The value of bilateral investment treaties is now more widely understood. Yesterday, Shubho Roy and I had a column in the Business Standard titled Bilateral investment treaties: From why to how. In this we propose a fund to pay the stream of claims, and that foreign investor confidence will return after the Indian state complies with a deep BIT, quietly paying out money as and when cases are lost, for decades.

XKDR Forum Newsletter for June 2026

Here it is.

When Anthropic was forced by the US government to cutoff access to the world to its latest models, there was much yearning in India for `sovereign AI’. Writing in the Business Standard yesterday, Siddharth Raman and I question the case for sovereign AI in India. We worry that such an attempt would constitute industrial policy. We propose a four-pronged Indian AI policy strategy.

Do public finance at XKDR Forum

We are recruiting in the field of public finance at XKDR Forum.

Food licensing and vending

In When remedies become regulation: The Karnataka High Court’s intervention in food licensing and street vending, on The Leap Blog, Prashant Narang, Aryan Pandey, and Indira Unninayar analyse the institutional consequences of courts undertaking regulatory design. They examine a 2025 judgment mandating new food safety rules for street vendors and assess this directive against existing legislation and state capacity. They find the court ignored the Street Vendors Act and the documented shortage of food safety officers. They argue that imposing high-discretion mandates on a low-capacity state apparatus fails to improve public health; instead, it generates selective enforcement, increases rent-seeking, and forces compliance costs onto informal workers.

Prashant Narang

Prashant Narang got an author page on The Leap Blog.

How EM policy makers navigate the economic problems of 2026 will matter for the world, and create heterogeneous performance across the 15 countries. My column in the Business Standard of 7 June.

Economic growth strategy for Karnataka

When we say `economic growth’ we generally think of the levers of the union government. But there is a meaningful way in which every state in India needs to develop a growth strategy that reflects its own problems and opportunities. K. P. Krishnan and I wrote an article in the Deccan Herald on 10 June about the growth strategy required for Karnataka.

AI for financial firms

Maninder Singh Juneja understands financial firms deeply. He wrote Trust in the era of the AI-informed consumer, on The Leap Blog, 7 June, on how the landscape of building profitable financial firms has changed owing to AI in the hands of the consumer.

Chinks in market efficiency: A Melody story

Meloni and Modi made friends, and the stock price of Parle Industries soared. On The Leap Blog on 4 June, Atibhi Sharma and I wrote Chinks in market efficiency: A Melody story about mistaken identities in stock market trading.

At the dawn of the 1990s the founding idea in financial reforms was the promise of an exchange: You must give me money, I must give you securities. The perfection of the machinery, the certainty of settlement, this is what financial reforms was all about. We got to a world with day after day of flawless, sustained, settlement perfection. Writing in The Print, Bhargavi Zaveri and I worry about the loss of institutional memory and purpose.

Market failures and the case for SOEs

In “A Market Failure Framework for Evaluating Public Sector Undertakings”, published on The Leap Blog, Arjun Krishnan formulates a bipartite framework to evaluate state-owned enterprises, replacing the standard metric of profitability. This work is necessary because assessing Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) via private-sector financial returns ignores their foundational mandate and confounds state decisions on privatisation or liquidation. Krishnan demonstrates that a PSU is ex-ante justified only when it addresses a persistent market failure that cannot be resolved through less costly interventions such as regulation, subsidies, or public-private contracting. The analysis establishes that ex-post performance must then be measured strictly through resource efficiency and the precise effectiveness of the enterprise in correcting its target market failure.

A cool district-level panel dataset

Two major developments in economic measurement are satellite imagery for night-time lights and for building volume. In each of these areas, there is a journey of establishing statistical and computational methods and then of innovating with creative applications. Examples of the former are link link and examples of the latter are link link.

Traditionally, the end-user required a significant amount of knowledge in order to get such databases up and running. For example, we have had many people like our bias-correction for nighttime lights data, and request this bias-corrected district level data that’s comparable with the World Bank release so that they don’t have to undertake this step. Similarly, many people are not yet using the superior Google building volume dataset.

In order to help reduce this friction for researchers working with Indian district-level data, we have released the XKDR Forum Nighttime lights and BV Dataset (2026). We have also released the code that gets to these datasets as Google colab notebooks, so you can reproduce our results, adapt this work for your country, or modify it in ways that fit you best.

XKDR Newsletter #50

The XKDR Newsletter for May 2026 is out.

There are important difficulties in the economy. In my column in the Business Standard on Monday, I offer ten elements of the economics strategy to overcome this situation.

The Indian exchange rate regime

The exchange rate regime is the stance of the government on the rupee. Many governments have a gap between words and deeds on this subject. There is a mature statistical toolkit to decipher the exchange rate regime from observed exchange rate data.

Rajeswari Sengupta and I have an article on The Leap Blog on 19 May, Words and deeds in the Indian exchange rate regime, on this subject. We document the evolution of the Indian exchange rate regime from 2000 onwards. Through this, we obtain a sense of where we are right now. We juxtapose these deeds against the words.

We have released a Google Colab notebook containing the R implementation of this work so that everyone can easily have this knowledge.

The Indian business elite has traditionally prioritised engagement with the United States. The world has changed, and there needs to be a much greater prioritisation for other OECD countries. My column in the Business Standard of 11 May argues in favour of a bigger place for Japan in Indian business strategy.

This is easier than the 1970s oil shock

Comparisons to the 1970s are inevitable. In my column in the Business Standard of 27 April, I argue that this is an easier situation than what the world experienced in the 1970s.

Who cares about a SEBI insider trading order?

Arjun Gupta, Sonam Patel and Renuka Sane have a pretty article on The Leap Blog, 11 May 2026, measuring the stock market impact upon firms where SEBI issues insider trading orders. Before you peek, ask yourself, what do you expect will happen?

Last conference of the forthcoming regulation book

K. P. Krishnan and I are building an edited book about regulation in India. This book represents important gains in knowledge and community in the field of regulation in India. We have pushed on process quality with multiple rounds of conferences and referee reports. The last conference of this project will take place in Bangalore in May. We expect the book will come out in early 2027.

A long-standing missing link in Indian economic policy has been the problem of a correct configuration of indirect taxation. A column in the Business Standard, Everyone loves a good GST, by Arbind Modi and me, emphasises how all political parties in India are unhappy with the present GST, and need to participate in solving it.

Call for papers

The 17th Emerging Markets Conference, 13-16 December, in Bombay. India’s best conference with strategic thinking about economics.

Chennai Mathematical Institute and XKDR Forum: Alt data workshop.

XKDR Forum: conference on cross-border frictions.

Episodes

Ep108 of Finance with Sharan, 11 April, on GST, AI, etc.

A vision for clean energy in India, on the Puliyabaazi podcast, 10 April.

Talk and discussion on the Iran war, at the Pune International Centre, 13 April.

Finance is the brain of the economy. The Securities Market Code Bill is a step forward. It strengthens governance and formalises regulation-making. There is too much power concentrated at SEBI; there is not enough check-and-balance; and the bill makes things worse. When state agencies have more power, state capability goes down. Natasha Aggarwal, Pratik Datta, K. P. Krishnan, Bhavin Patel, M. S. Sahoo, Renuka Sane, Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah and I lay out what needs to change in the Securities Market Code Bill, 2025, on The Leap Blog.

India’s energy ambitions

In the article Evaluating India’s Energy Ambitions: Evidence from Electricity Generation Project-Level Data, published on The Leap Blog, Upasa Borah, Akshay Jaitly and Renuka Sane unveil an important new paper. They study how electricity generation projects evolve from announcement to completion. They use project-level data from the CMIE CapEx database covering 8,540 projects announced between 1957 and 2024, and find a large gap between what is announced and what gets built: only 15% of announced conventional capacity and 9% of announced renewable capacity has been completed. Applying a survival model to projects in the pipeline, they find India is likely to fall short of its 500 GW non-fossil target by around 77 GW. The challenge is not the ambition of announcements, but rather whether projects get implemented and completed on time.

Arbitration deadlines

Section 29A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act sets time limits for arbitral awards. Courts can sanction delay. In practice, they do not. Prashant Narang and Renuka Sane have a new paper where they look at 202 Delhi High Court orders between 2015 and 2024. Extensions were granted in 198 cases. Fee reductions in zero. Imposing a penalty is hard. Granting an extension is easy. Courts choose easy. A deadline without consequences is not a deadline. Their unveiling of the paper is at What happens when arbitration deadlines are missed, on The Leap Blog.

Natasha Aggarwal

Natasha Aggarwal got an author page on The Leap Blog.

From the early 1970s onwards, global oil shocks have roiled the Indian economy. At present, 24.3 per cent of total energy supply comes from imported crude oil and gas.

This macroeconomic vulnerability and security threat has been normalised. But there is plenty of sunshine in India and modern renewables can do more. At the end of 20 years of energy policy, the share of modern renewables stands at just 3.2% of the Indian total energy supply. The present policy paradigm isn’t working.

In my column in the Business Standard yesterday, I talk about Reducing energy vulnerability.

Gains from messy regulatory footprints

Regulatory architecture is the block diagram of multiple regulatory agencies and the footprint of each of them. In the Indian mainstream, clarity of the regulatory perimeter, and the absence of regulatory arbitrage or forum shoppying, is prized. Amrita Agarwal and I have an article on The Leap Blog on 27 March, where we suggest there are gains for society from some kinds of messy regulatory footprints. The desire for clarity and completeness of state power is the viewpoint of the state, and not necessarily optimal for the people.

Episodes

Ep 25 of the Growth is Good podcast with Rahul Ahluwalia, Why firms build economies, 27 March.

Govindraj Ethiraj had me on his `Core report’ show talking about INR depreciation, on 24 March, drawing on my recent column in the Business Standard.

My column in the Business Standard from Monday, Indian services exports in the AI challenge, tries to peer into the future. I argue that investors, board members and the leadership of the relevant Indian organisations have to do much heavy lifting in facing the coming changes. Each organisation requires a portfolio of bets reflecting views about how all this will work out. But I’m largely optimistic about the need for skilled Indian labour in the new world.

In the article LRS, TCS and Overseas Travel: A Policy Design Critique, published on The Leap Blog, Anirudh Burman looks at the “Tax Collection at Source” collision between the Indian policy philosophy on autarky and the Indian policy philosophy on taxation.

The problems come together with outward remittances and overseas tour packages. The current framework introduces significant economic frictions and regulatory uncertainty due to frequent changes in tax rates, thresholds, and definitions since 2020. These upfront levies impose a cost to society — avoidable liquidity constraints and disproportionate compliance costs on individuals — in return for no clearly stated policy objective. While recent proposals to reduce certain rates are a positive step, the underlying instrument design remains flawed and hinders the global economic integration of Indian households.

Too many third-party motor accident claims

In the article The MACT Litigation Overload: How India’s Regulatory Trifecta Forces Cases into Court, authors Siddarth Raman and Maya Ramesh analyze the structural causes behind the million-plus pending motor accident claims in India. They argue that the current regulatory framework — characterized by mandatory insurance, fixed premiums, and uncapped liability — disrupts the economic foundations of the insurance market. The rules create misaligned incentives where insurers are encouraged to delay payments and claimants are motivated to pursue litigation for higher awards, resulting in cases that often exceed a decade in duration. The path to reform lies in shifting toward risk-based pricing and a capped liability schedule to reduce the burden on the judiciary and improve outcomes for victims.

Are all regulators equal?

In their article Are all regulators equal? The Supreme Court doesn’t think so, published on The Leap Blog, Chitrakshi Jain and Bhavin Patel analyse recent Indian Supreme Court decisions that differentiate between the functions and appellate rights of various sectoral regulators. The authors examine how inconsistent judicial interpretations of “quasi-judicial” versus “regulatory” functions create legal uncertainty, specifically regarding the ability of bodies like the Electricity Regulatory Commissions to appeal adverse tribunal orders. They find that this ad hoc approach leads to arbitrary distinctions between regulators, undermines expert autonomy in tariff determination, and violates principles of separation of powers. This work highlights the urgent need for better laws that determine how regulators work, e.g. the 140 sections of the draft Indian Financial Code.

Siddarth Raman

Siddharth Raman got an author page on The Leap Blog.

IIHS University

IIHS University has opened applications for five interdisciplinary Masters programs and a PhD track.

We’re all slowly coming to grips with what happened. My column in the Business Standard yesterday places the US trade deal in the larger context of Indian trade policy, and the global trade non-system.

India’s middle power dilemma

Mark Carney’s famous speech envisions a world of cooperation between middle powers, of which India is one. I wrote a column on this on Project Syndicate : India’s middle power dilemma [another link]. It will take time for the country’s foreign-policy establishment to move away from “strategic autonomy” as a guiding principle, and recent US behavior has confirmed skeptics’ arguments (in India) that the West is unreliable.

The importance of single asset securitisation

In their article Beyond Syndication: Unlocking the Power of Single-Asset Securitisation, published on The Leap Blog, Amrita Agarwal and Harsh Vardhan examine the 2021 Reserve Bank of India regulatory shift that allows lenders to securitize individual project loans rather than diversified pools. The authors argue that this mechanism offers a superior alternative to traditional consortium lending by transforming illiquid private contracts into tradable financial instruments. Their analysis reveals that while this "securitisation of one" addresses systemic asset-liability mismatches and opens infrastructure debt to institutional investors, its adoption remains hindered by high state stamp duties and restrictive listing regulations. This is an important path for financing private capital expenditure and managing long-term credit risk in Indian banking.

Understanding Budget 2026, my column in the Business Standard today.

Gains from decontrol

Net FDI in India for the full 2024-25 was $29 billion. In calendar 2025, there were five FDI transactions into banks/NBFCs that added up to $11 billion. Small shifts in policy, in favour of decontrol of cross-border transactions, generated this large impact. These developments are good for Indian finance, an industry with outsized importance for Indian economic growth. They remind us of the outsized gains feasible through removing state restrictions upon cross-border private activity. My column in the Business Standard on this: Gains from decontrol.

The art and science of economic policy, on Coursera

Aromar Revi, Vijay Kelkar and I built a course, The Art and Science of Economic Policy. This was based on the book In service of the republic: The art and science of economic policy. This is a part of the `Digital blended learning’ initiative at IIHS. The course now has 10,004 learners, 5,928 active learners and 2,609 completers.

Srinivas Alavilli wrote a note on ideas of the book.

Recent events around Tiger Global have brought fresh interest in the Indian government’s treatment of taxation of cross-border flows. Renuka Sane and I wrote a column in the Business Standard on 19 January, The value of the Mauritius treaty. We review the economic gains from residence-based taxation. Foreign investors are now deterred by a combination of source-based taxation and legal risk. As with many other aspects of tax policy [link, link], we need to re-center economic policy around the objective of economic growth, instead of the pursuit of tactical revenue gains, third world solidarity, or arbitrary power.

Cholesterol in the GST

Vijay Kelkar, Arbind Modi and I have been writing about the problems of the GST. In particular, we worry that blockages in input-tax credit have, in many situations, reduced the Indian GST to a traditional style cascading production tax instead of actually being a VAT. To call it a GST has more than a whiff of isomorphic mimicry. We then undertook the detailed legal analysis to identify the pathways through which the present law generates blockages of input-tax credit. This is the paper Input Tax Credit and refunds under GST in India: Conceptual and legal framework, Arbind Modi, Ajay Shah, XKDR Forum Working Paper 44, December 2025. There is an unveiling article on The Leap Blog.

LLMs for regulatory orders

Every regulatory employee is tantalised by the prospect of going to ChatGPT and getting an order done. While this is a terrifying prospect in terms of the over-arching principle of correctness, there are ways in which LLMs can potentially be used sensibly in regulators.

Natasha Aggarwal, Satyavrat Bondre, Amrutha Desikan, Bhavin Patel & Dipyaman Sanyal of Trustbridge have a new paper Can technology augment order writing capacity at regulators?, and they have an unveiling article on The Leap Blog.

Siddharth Raman review of Anand Prasad book

Unshackling the elephant is an important new book, by an insider to the Indian law profession, which uniquely questions the foundations of how the Indian legal system works. Siddharth Raman has a book review on The Leap Blog.

One of the most important weak links holding India back is the legal system. A high quality judiciary is fundamental to a competitive market economy and competitive political system. Important new work has begun, for one case type for one district court, in trying to rethink how district courts work [link, link].

Good intentions do not suffice in the world of public policy. Policy makers need to be grounded in principles of freedom, checks and balances, liberal democracy, the price system, public choice theory and limitations of state capability. In addition, the policy process requires a process of iterative refinement, where outcomes are measured (not just effort) and policy design is steadily modified so as to fare better. For this, it is important to measure the baseline. We need to write down the report card prior to the reform, and then we can watch things change (or fail to change).

Writing on The Leap Blog on 21 November, Siddharth Raman documents the baseline for the Kollam court reform.

Electricity outages in Delhi

One of the outrageous features of the Indian electricity system is voltage / frequency fluctations and power outages. This is a tax upon modernity. Substantial capital costs and process overhead is imposed upon all firms and households in trying to deal with this. It is a `quality of service’ failure: the customer is paying the full price for electricity but getting something that is sub-standard. It is tantamount to paying for a 100 gram packet of biscuits but actually getting 70 grams. These failures of the Indian electricity system are one of the important impediments faced by manufacturing in India.

Upasa Borah and Renuka Sane of Trustbridge Rule of Law Foundation have been studying this problem. They got an article out on The Leap Blog on 25 September, A review of outage reporting by Indian discoms. The next step in their research program is An analysis of electricity outages in Delhi: 2024-25, published on The Leap Blog on 6 December.

Here, they evaluate the transparency and reliability of power supply data from Delhi’s three private distribution companies. By extracting and cleaning fragmented reporting from BSES Rajdhani, BSES Yamuna, and Tata Power, they reveal significant inconsistencies in how outages are recorded and categorized across different spatial units. They find that while outages are frequent, a lack of standardised reporting on "redundancy" and consumer-level impacts makes it difficult to assess actual service reliability or hold providers accountable.

Centrally planned electricity systems work well in a stable world. Three big changes have hit the global electricity system: climate change, technical change in renewables and storage, and demand surges associated with crypto-currencies and AI. From advanced economies all the way to Pakistan, the traditional centrally planned electricity system is fumbling when faced with this pace of change. The price system is of essence, in creating conditions for private firms to take risks, deploy capital, and anticipate requirements of all the elements of the electricity system at future dates. My column in the Business Standard today.

Emerging Markets Conference 2025

The slideshows and papers are up on the website.

Costs in arbitration

From Statute to Zero-Cost: Section 31A and the Bombay High Court’s Zero-Cost Culture by Prashant Narang and Vishnu Suresh, unveils their new paper.

There is a "loser-pays" principle in Indian arbitration law. The authors conduct a mixed-methods study of 102 decisions from the Bombay High Court between 2023 and 2024 to evaluate whether the 2015 legislative amendments to Section 31A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act have effectively deterred frivolous litigation. Their findings reveal that costs were imposed in only 3.9% of cases, indicating that the statutory presumption in favor of the successful party remains largely unenforced. This shows a systemic "deterrence gap" where the absence of financial consequences for weak petitions encourages tactical delays and speculative filings. The authors propose specific reforms—including mandatory reasons for withholding costs and receipt-anchored scales—to align courtroom reality with legislative intent.

Episodes

Deepak disagrees, Ep15, Autarky, globalisation, pragmatism.