Academic Themes

Notes on my research, book reviews and discussions on social sciences
This section contains articles on some of my main areas of academic interest including economics, development studies, collective action, social policy, governance and the right to food. A few articles look software and utilities that would be of interest to researchers. If you are interested in any of these in particular, please click on the subtopic on the menu to your right.

Bus Routes.in: Website providing information on bus routes in Madras using information on routes gathered by crowd sourcing.

The Bulgarian Anticorruption Portal: Media coverage of corruption stories, anti-corruption initiatives in Bulgaria and links to research on corruption from across the world.

I paid a bribe: The innovative crowd sourcing platform by Janaagraha to crowd source reports on demands for bribes in India. The website has inspired many such initatives internationally.

Anti-Corruption Resources: Transparency International UK’s page with links to articles and websites of other organisations working on corruption. There are detailed case studies from different countries on anti-corruption measures.

Climate Collaboratorium: Seeks to use the collective intelligence of people to develop a plan on climate change. It’s a project of center for collective intelligence at MIT.

Sunlight Foundation: The foundation is, “a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for open government globally and uses technology to make government more accountable to all. We do so by creating tools, open data, policy recommendations, journalism and grant opportunities to dramatically expand access to vital government information to create accountability of our public officials”. The website is a great source of information on open data policy, political financing and a range of other topics in the intersection of technology and transparency.

This We Know: Explore U.S. Government Data About Your Community: Collates data from various US Government databases and presents them at the community level that can be searched by zip code.

School Report Cards: NUPA’s school monitoring system that has recent school level data for more than 1.2 million schools in India.

Public Database Indexing Guidelines: North Carolina is mandated by law to maintain an index of all electronic public records with description of available data. This is a guideline prepared by the State government to prepare an index of the databases

Edward Tufte and Graphics Press: Edward Tufte is a well known political scientist who specialises in communicating information in creative ways using data visualization.

Apps4Africa: A contest to build mobile based technologies that could be used for social purposes in Africa

Technology for Transparency Network |: A collection of projects that use technology for promoting transparency. The case studies can be accessed by the country.

MyNeta – Candidate Affidavits for Elections in India: Information on all Members of Parliaments of India based on the affidavits they file with the election commission. Visitors are permitted to point out inconsistencies between the given information and the case on the ground.

Corruption & Integrity Improvement Initiatives in Developing Countries: A book on corruption and anti-corruption initiatives by UNDP with case studies from different countries, along with a discussion of anti-corruption initiatives.

Not all that unique by Reetika Khera: UID has limited scope for reducing corruption, even if it works as intended; but as things stand. Development and reduction of corruption are used as a smokescreen for what is mainly a project driven by security establishment and corporate interests, argues the author.

Human Rights Project in the Cyberspace:

Government Records Branch of North Carolina: Contains detailed formats, guidelines and other information on public records and its management that is useful for RTI activists.

Open Government Guide: A complete compendium of information on every state’s open records and open meetings laws in the United States. Each state’s section is arranged according to a standard outline, making it easy to compare laws in various states.

Sunshine Review: Sunshine Review is a non-profit organization dedicated to state and local government transparency in the United States. The Sunshine Review wiki collects and shares transparency information and uses a 10-point Transparency Checklist to evaluate the content of every state and more than 5,000 local government websites.

Journal of E-Government: It is “a new professional journal focusing on the application and practice of e-government in its broadest sense