Navroz Dubash and Narasimha Rao recently published The Practice and Politics of Regulation – Regulatory Governance in Indian Electricity, a detailed study of electricity regulators in Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. In an op-ed published last week in The Hindu [1] newspaper, they note that: "to some, regulators are saviours who will wrest the sector away from self-dealing politicians. To others, regulators are simply a cover for business as usual, while keeping international investors and donors happy.... The bottom line is that regulators have brought about moderate, and, in some cases, significant improvements in performance, primarily by exposing the functioning of utilities to the light of day through a steadily evolving process of scrutiny. This is no small achievement. However, they have fallen short of changing the deeper framework of incentives. To do so would require reshaping regulators from technocratic decision-makers to facilitators of greater democratic accountability."

Read the full op-ed here [2].