Text: Regulatory performance in India: achievements, constraints, and future action contains the proceedings of six plenary sessions of an eponymous conference organized by TERI. It covers background papers, presentations, and the discussions held after each session.

The rise of the regulatory state has been a major feature of modern constitutional democracies. India, the world's largest democracy, is no exception to this trend. This book is the first major study of regulation in India. It considers how the development of regulation in India has altered the nature and functions of the state; how it is reshaping the relationship between business and the state; how it has called for the refashioning of established legal principles; and how it has raised new questions about the relationship between technical expertise and the rule of law. The chapters cover topics ranging from the foundations of the Indian regulatory state to the form of regulation across different sectors to regulation in practice. Together, the chapters reveal the challenges, promise, and limitations offered by contemporary regulatory practices, and they capture the close if sometimes fraught relationship that regulation must inevitably share with the political economy and constitutional schema within which it operates.

The essays in this volume present an analytical appraisal of public institutions in India. The purpose here is not just to give a history of these institutions but to ask what explains their performance and what might be learnt from their experience. It assesses the manner in which they assist, thwart, manipulate, and subvert each other. The aim is to provide a complex account of the modalities through which state power is exercised and policy enacted. This study contributes to debates on institutional change and reform that are currently underway in India by bringing more analytical rigour and enlarging the parameters of the debate. These debates are particularly important given that Indian economy and society have changed profoundly in the last decade and a half. Much of the discussion is on how state institutions like the civil service, the courts, the police, parliament, and regulatory institutions will need to be reconfigured to better adapt to changing circumstances.

With reference to management of public enterprises.