This study examines emerging geopolitical alliances through Social Network Analysis of UNGA voting patterns. Using Voeten’s dataset, similarity scores, Louvain clustering, and centrality measures, it identifies fragmented voting blocs and highlights the shift toward fluid, issue-based geopolitical partnerships.
This study evaluates whether India’s Make in India initiative, launched in 2014, actually raised tariff rates and whether it reduced India’s import dependence on China. Using WITS and World Bank data from 2010–2023, the authors compare pre- and post-policy tariffs across six priority sectors — food products, footwear, machinery and electronics, textiles, transportation, and chemicals — through independent sample t-tests and panel regression models. The results show that tariff increases were statistically significant only in footwear; every other sector saw no meaningful change, and in several cases tariffs actually fell post-2014. Regression analysis further finds that tariffs had no statistically significant effect on China’s share of India’s imports, while GDP was the strongest predictor. The paper concludes that Make in India’s goals were likely advanced more through infrastructure, technology, and ease-of-doing-business reforms than through tariff protection itself.
This study examines how India’s free trade agreements and critical mineral pacts with Africa influence macroeconomic growth, supply chain resilience, and industrial performance. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research addresses the void regarding mineral diplomacy in trade literature. It evaluates whether strategic partnerships with initiatives like KABIL enhance India’s industrial security and clean-energy transition while balancing resource acquisition, domestic value addition, and sustainable development.
This paper examines the legal and ethical challenges surrounding digital remains, post-mortem privacy, and personality rights in India. Through comparative analysis, it highlights gaps in existing laws and advocates comprehensive legislation protecting dignity, autonomy, and informational privacy after death.
When a person dies, their physical belongings are settled — but their digital footprint lives on. This study examines post-mortem privacy, comparing how India, the European Union, and the United States handle the protection, ownership, and management of a deceased person’s personal data. It finds that current legal frameworks offer only limited safeguards and calls for a more balanced approach that honors the dignity, privacy, and wishes of the deceased alongside evolving technology.
AUTHORS: RASHI SINGH, AROHI, ANANYA GUPTA, HANNAH, DISHA GOSWAMI, HARSHAD, PRINCE, PARVATHY Abstract India’s public expenditure on school education has increased over the past two decades, although independent evaluations of early learning are much lower than required competencies for grades. The difference between investment expenditure and learning outcomes achieved is precisely the issue addressed in this paper. Drawing on a state-level panel that pairs disaggregated education-budget data with structural inputs (pupil-teacher ratios) and independently assessed learning outcomes (ASER), the study progresses from macro-level trend analysis to pooled cross-sectional correlation and a first-differenced, state-fixed-effects panel. The descriptive record shows education’s share of state budgets drifting downward even as classroom staffing improved, while learning followed a non-monotonic, V-shaped path of pandemic-era decline and partial recovery. Once state heterogeneity is differenced out, neither aggregate expenditure share nor pupil-teacher ratio retains a statistically significant association with learning. Rather than implying that public spending is irrelevant, the results indicate that aggregate expenditure is a poor proxy for the quality of education: the expenditure-learning relationship in India is conditional, regime-dependent, and heterogeneous across states. The paper argues that whether, and by how much, expenditure improves learning in India’s lowest-performing states remains the critical unanswered question in Indian education finance, and it specifies threshold and quantile regression on disaggregated data as the targeted next step this baseline evidence motivates. Keywords: public education expenditure; learning outcomes; ASER; state-level panel; fixed-effects regression; threshold regression; quantile regression; NEP 2020; NIPUN Bharat; expenditure composition; education finance; India 1. Introduction Imagine a large, three-storey building -well maintained, equipped with classrooms, laboratories, and air conditioning: a government school. You enter a Grade V classroom and, for the sake of curiosity, ask three students to solve a long-division problem. Only one can; the others visibly struggle. What went wrong? The question is not rhetorical. A World Bank assessment reports that nearly half of India’s ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text, and ASER 2024 finds that three out of four Standard III students in government schools cannot read a Standard II textbook. They are not only numbers, they represent the reality of students in government schools today. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” has been a common quote for many years, but the facts on basic education speak a different tale. India’s school-education system presents one of the most consequential puzzles in contemporary public policy: which is an increased investment in schooling for children without any commensurate gain in learning levels. Since the introduction of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program, which made universal elementary education central to national policy, there has been a significant rise in government expenditure on schooling. But when the question shifts from whether children attend school to whether they learn while attending it, the picture changes completely. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which measures foundational reading and arithmetic among school-going children, has documented for nearly two decades that most children in government schools cannot read or perform arithmetic at grade-appropriate levels. This paper uses the above dilemma as the central analytical issue and poses a series of questions: Is greater spending better for learning, and under what circumstances would the public money spent have the biggest impact on learning? The questions need to be explored with a better understanding than just asking whether there is a relationship between spending and learning. Issues such as what type of spending, spending levels, and the conditions of spending need to be considered. As equally important is the diversity of the federal education system in India where expenditures and learning outcomes differ from one state to another. With regard to this problem, the need for an effective educational policy was greatly emphasized by the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which symbolizes an unprecedented institutional change with respect to India’s perception of educational success from “schooling for all” to “learning for all.” This reframing is, in effect, an official acknowledgement that the input-expansion model of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan era has reached diminishing returns with respect to what ultimately matters. The existing literature on the expenditure-learning relationship in India leaves an important gap. No prior study estimates that relationship on a multi-year, multi-state panel while simultaneously allowing for non-linear threshold effects and permitting the effect to differ between low- and high-performing states. Every earlier design falls short on at least one dimension: two-point compound-growth comparisons and single-state case studies produce findings that cannot be generalised and cannot identify the functional form of the relationship, while simple correlational designs impose linearity and assume that the relationship between spending and learning is constant across all spending levels -an assumption the literature itself predicts to be wrong. This paper therefore examines the relationship between public education expenditure and learning outcomes across Indian states within a state-level panel framework. It advances two propositions that the ASER 2024 pedagogy-driven recovery makes plausible: first, that the composition of spending moves learning outcomes more than its volume; and second, that treating education expenditure as a single aggregate is the central measurement failure of the prior literature. The novelty of the study lies less in asking new questions than in replacing poorly posed ones with better ones, and in deploying a tiered empirical strategy in which each estimator is a targeted response to a documented failure of previous work. The analysis reported here establishes the descriptive and fixed-effects baseline; on the strength of what that baseline reveals, it specifies threshold and quantile regression on disaggregated fiscal data as the analytical program the evidence motivates. 2. Literature Review Public expenditure on school education in India has risen substantially, in nominal and real terms, over the past two decades, yet independent assessments continue to record learning levels far below grade-appropriate competency. This chapter reviews the empirical, theoretical, and policy literature bearing on that paradox, drawing on descriptive budget-trend analyses, regression-based panel studies, efficiency-frontier estimations, systematic reviews, and state-specific case studies. The review is organised thematically rather than source by source;
This review examines the sources, transport pathways, and human exposure routes of micro- and macroplastics in Indian water bodies, and the limitations of current detection methods. It finds that smaller, health-relevant particle fractions are consistently under-detected
Authors: Boluwatife Osanyibi, Bhavya Anand, Diksha Chopra Abstract The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) serves as a key multilateral forum where member states articulate their foreign policy preferences through voting behavior, offering valuable insights into the evolving structure of international politics. Among the issues debated within the UN, the Israel–Palestine conflict remains one of the most enduring and politically contested, making it an appropriate case for examining contemporary geopolitical alignments. This study investigates emerging geopolitical alliances by analyzing UNGA voting behavior on Israel–Palestine-related resolutions using Social Network Analysis (SNA). The theoretical foundation integrates Structural Realism, Defensive Realism, Constructivism, Postcolonial Theory, Liberal Institutionalism, and Complex Interdependence Theory which collectively demonstrates that state behavior within multilateral institutions is shaped by the interaction of strategic interests, power configurations, institutional linkages, and shared historical and normative identities. The research adopts a quantitative design using official voting records obtained from the United Nations Digital Library (UNDL) and the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL). Voting data for General Assembly resolutions are coded numerically and analyzed using Social Network Analysis in Girvan–Newman community detection algorithms, together with centrality measures, were employed to identify voting communities, influential states, and bridging actors. The findings reveal the three major geopolitical voting blocs: a highly cohesive Global South–BRICS coalition, an isolated United States–Israel bloc, and a European intermediary group characterized by strategic abstentions and variable voting behavior The analysis also identifies bridge states that connect polarized communities and highlights a transition towards a more fragmented and multipolar international order. Overall, the study demonstrates that UNGA voting patterns serves as a robust indicator of evolving geopolitical alliances and offers important insights into contemporary patterns of international cooperation and diplomatic alignment. Keywords: United Nations General Assembly, geopolitical alliances, network analysis, voting patterns, Israel –Palestine Issue. 1. Introduction The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) serves as one of the most significant multilateral forums on which countries publicly express their foreign policy preference on political, security and humanitarian matters that have global ramifications. The voting behavior of member states in the United Nations General Assembly represents one of the most observable manifestations of foreign policy in practice. Although General Assembly resolutions are not legally enforceable, Votes cast in favor, against, or through abstention is not merely a procedural exercise but a reflection of broader geopolitical dynamics. States often vote in accordance with their strategic interests, regional affiliations, ideological commitments, historical relationships, economic partnerships, and domestic political considerations. Consequently, similarities in voting behavior may indicate the existence of diplomatic coalitions or emerging geopolitical alliances and the evolving dynamics of global politics. UNGA vote records, in contrast to bilateral diplomatic pronouncements, offer standardized, publicly accessible, and longitudinal data that allow for the methodical analysis of foreign policy behavior across time and among nations. In order to study ideological proximity, alliance formation, regional cooperation, and shifts in global political alignments, international relations research has made considerable use of UN vote statistics. Among numerous issues debated within the United Nations, Israel- Palestine conflict is one of the most deeply entrenched and contentious conflict in contemporary international relations. For decades, protracted conflict has influenced global diplomacy, international laws, humanitarian policies and the foreign policy orientation of states across international relations. The root cause of conflict lies in competing historical narratives, territorial disputes, security concerns, religious significance, and the emergence of both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The conflict has evolved through several defining events, including the British Mandate for Palestine, the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan (1947), the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Arab–Israeli wars, the displacement of Palestinian refugees (Nakba), the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza following the Six-Day War of 1967, the Oslo Peace Process, and the Hamas attack of October 2023. These events have made conflict exceptionally resistant to peaceful resolution despite numerous diplomatic negotiations longstanding issues such as the status of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugees, security, and the right to self-determination remain unsettled (Gelvin, 2021; Pappé, 2006). United Nations have played a fundamental role in addressing intractable conflict. United Nations have attempted to provide a legal framework, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping efforts and diplomatic mechanism though adoption of UNGA and UNSC resolutions aimed at resolving dispute. The Israel–Palestine conflict serves as an excellent example for exploring geopolitical alignments, as it has consistently featured in the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly for many years and has led to repeated resolutions garnering significant involvement from member states. This issue often goes beyond regional politics and highlights larger divisions within the international framework, which makes it especially relevant for examining trends in diplomatic collaboration and alliance building. Voting behavior on Israel–Palestine-related resolutions extend beyond the immediate issues under consideration and often reflects broader geopolitical realities. States frequently vote in accordance with strategic partnerships, regional alliances, ideological commitments, historical ties, security interests, and evolving diplomatic priorities. While some countries have demonstrated remarkable consistency in their voting behavior, others have altered their positions in response to domestic political changes, leadership transitions, regional developments, or shifts in the international balance of power. Analyzing these patterns provides an opportunity to understand the evolution of international alliances beyond traditional military or regional blocs and offers valuable insights into changing patterns of global diplomacy. The growing availability of United Nations voting data has enabled researchers to employ quantitative approaches for analyzing interstate behavior. Among the various analytical approaches, Wasserman and Faust (1994) argue that network analysis offers a systematic framework for examining relationships among actors based on their interactions. Applied to UN voting, this approach conceptualises states as interconnected actors whose voting similarities reveal patterns of cooperation, coalition formation, and geopolitical alignment. Newman (2010) further explains that network analysis enables researchers to identify clusters of closely connected actors, measure the relative importance of individual actors within a network, and examine changes in network structures over time. a powerful methodology to represent the relationship among different entities and to
This study examines whether the India–UAE CEPA (2022) has causally driven green energy investment or merely coincided with broader global and domestic renewable trends, finding that while bilateral trade has grown, renewable energy investment impact remains limited.
Authors: Riddhika Bohra, Dhanishtha Meena ABSTRACT This study evaluates the Indian school education system by analyzing the persistent execution gap between allocated Budget Estimates (BE) and Actual Expenditures (AE) using official Ministry of Education data from FY 2016–17 to FY 2020–21, the study tracks quantitative budget-expenditure gaps across Central, State/UT, and school levels. It complements this with a multi-source diagnostic analysis across five thematic case studies. Despite national policy targets to spend 6% of GDP on public education, persistent fund under-utilization severely weakens school infrastructure, teacher capacity, and student retention across the country. Keywords: Budget-Expenditure Gap, Indian School Education, Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, Fiscal Federalism, Fund Utilization. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Background of Study Education was assigned to the State List at the time of Independence, which meant state governments carried the primary responsibility for running schools, while the central government’s role remained largely advisory. The first few Five-Year Plans focused on industry and infrastructure, so education was not a fiscal priority in this period; public spending stayed close to 3.5% of GDP (PRS Legislative Research, 2022) for decades. This shifted after the Kothari Commission (1964-66) recommended raising education spending to 6% of GDP, a target later formalized in the National Policy on Education, 1968. That target remains unmet over fifty years later. This historical context establishes the foundation of this study: a persistent gap between policy commitments and actual funding, which predates the contemporary data analyzed herein. The year 1991 serves as a significant dividing line in this history. India’s economic liberalisation coincided with a broader shift toward administrative decentralisation, raising critical questions in policy debates about whether education’s share of a rapidly growing economy was keeping pace. Empirical research on this period remains divided. A panel study of Indian states from 2002 to 2020 indicates that fiscal decentralisation reforms had a broadly positive effect on education and health service delivery, although outcomes depended heavily on local institutional quality and accountability (Singh, Bhattacharjee, & Nandy, 2024). Conversely, researchers examining school-level decentralisation present less optimistic findings. One recent study tracing the effects of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments on school management found mixed, and in some cases negative, effects on student achievement (Kameshwara, Shields, & Sandoval-Hernandez, 2023). Concurrently, the central government began playing a larger role through centrally sponsored schemes that required states to co-finance programmes; this shift highlights how education’s placement on the Concurrent List directly contributes to contemporary budget-expenditure mismatches. Two indicators are utilized in this study to track this gap, chosen to capture different dimensions of the issue. Education expenditure as a share of GDP—which rose only slightly from about 3.8% in 2013-14 to 4.64% in 2020-21 (PRS Legislative Research, 2022), remaining well short of the 6% goal—measures whether education is being prioritised relative to the size of the economy over time. The second indicator, the variance between Budget Estimates (BE) and Actual Expenditure in a given year, captures implementation-level rather than policy-level shortfalls by measuring whether allocated funds are successfully deployed. Together, these two measures distinguish the issue of whether India allocates sufficient funds for education from the issue of whether it effectively spends those allocations. Furthermore, this execution gap varies significantly across the different stages of school education. Elementary education has generally received the strongest policy attention, supported by the legal mandate of the Right to Education Act, 2009. In contrast, secondary education faces greater challenges; enrollment ratios decline noticeably at this stage, and several centrally sponsored schemes designed to support it have repeatedly underspent their allocations (PRS Legislative Research, 2025). Higher secondary education exhibits even more severe disparities, marked by sharp enrollment declines and comparatively little budgetary focus. This historical pattern is corroborated by earlier state-level budget analyses, which demonstrate that elementary education is consistently prioritized over secondary education across most states (CBGA-CRY, 2016, 2018, as cited in Kundu & Rastogi, 2020). Given the distinct fiscal challenges at each stage, this study analyses elementary, secondary, and higher secondary education as separate analytical categories rather than a uniform system. 1.2. Statement of Problem Despite constitutional provisions and recurring national policy targets aiming to devote 6% of GDP to public education, India’s public educational spending remains persistently low, hovering well below this threshold. However, the key challenge facing the Indian school education system is not merely the initial quantum of funds announced in annual budgets, but the systematic and recurring divergence between what is allocated (Budget Estimates) and what is actually spent on the ground (Actual Expenditure). This expenditure shortfall manifests across all administrative levels, driven by multi-layered bureaucratic red tape, delayed fund flows leading to a “year-end expenditure rush” and rigid matching-grant requirements between the Centre and States. Furthermore, public expenditure is severely skewed toward fixed revenue expenses such as teacher salaries, effectively crowding out essential capital investments in school infrastructure. Because this execution gap varies significantly across school tiers (elementary versus secondary) and regional economic boundaries, there is a critical need to evaluate how these fiscal mismatches occur and identify the structural, operational, and institutional factors causing allocated funds to lapse. 1.3. Research Questions What are the trends of gap in education expenditure in the Indian school education system? What do the trends of gap in education expenditure look like for three levels in Indian Schools? What are the factors driving differences between actual and budgeted education expenditure? 1.4. Aim of Study The primary aim of this study is to evaluate the Indian school education system through a comprehensive analysis of the gap between allocated budget estimates and actual expenditures. Specifically, the research seeks to analyze the longitudinal trends in education expenditure gaps at the macroeconomic level across Central, State, and combined governmental tiers. Furthermore, it aims to examine how these budgetary mismatches manifest across the distinct stages of school education—specifically comparing elementary and secondary levels. Ultimately, the study intends to conduct diagnostic qualitative and case-study evaluations to identify the systemic, operational, and institutional factors driving the divergence between budgeted and actual education spending. 1.5. Objectives of Study To analyze the trend of gap