Author: Sanjeev Ahluwalia

Sanjeev S. Ahluwalia has core skills in economic regulation, institutional development, decentralization, public sector performance management and governance. He is presently a Distinguished Fellow Chintan Research Foundation. Previously he was affiliated with the Observer Research Foundation as an Advisor (2014-24); Senior Specialist with the Africa Poverty Reduction and Economic Management network of the World Bank for over seven years, 2005-2013. He has over a decade of experience at the national level in the Ministry of Finance, Government of India as Joint Secretary, Disinvestment from 2002 to 2005 and earlier in the Department of Economic Affairs in commercial debt management and Asian Development Bank financed projects and trade development with East Asia in the Ministry of Commerce. He was also the first Secretary of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission from 1999 to 2000. He worked in TERI as a Senior Fellow from 1995 to 1998 in the areas of governance and regulation of the electricity sector and institutional development for renewable energy growth. Previously he served the Government of Uttar Pradesh, India in various capacities at the District and State level from 1980 onwards as a member of the Indian Administrative Service. His last job was as Secretary Finance (Expenditure management) Government of UP from 2001 to 2002. He has a Masters in Economic Policy Management from Columbia University, New York; a post graduate Diploma in Financial Management from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University and a Masters in History from St. Stephens College, Delhi.

Reality check: Coal CCUS Key for Energy Transition

Energy transition projections remain open ended about phasing down coal mining and coal-based power generation. This is, unsurprisingly, the most difficult segment of the transition for India because coal reserves are the only fossil energy resource India has in abundance. Ten coal producers account for about 90 percent of global coal production—China-50 percent, India-10 percent, Indonesia-7 […]

AI: Keep the Genie Bottled

Humans have faced existential threats before during the 300,000 years they have been around. Self-inflicted harm exceeds damage from natural calamities. Science has grown our understanding of how human progress itself seeds new existential threats. And yet, humans have proliferated and benefited from each scientific iteration that outsourced work to machines. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) […]

wield The stick to walk the Long Road to Net Zero

The path to net zero is not just long but also likely to be a twisted, winding mountain road, full of uncertainties and expensive, risky alternatives, necessitating doubling back often, technology hopping and nimbly stepping past geopolitical disruptions. Scientists, technologists, businesses, and politicians should lead The pilots for this enterprise are scientists, technologists, and businesses […]

IPSOS Global Survey 2023 on Climate Action Perceptions

Seventy percent of Indians believe that their country is a world leader in climate action—the highest endorsement across 29 advanced, upper- and lower-middle-income economies excluding China, as per the IPSOS Global Survey. On average, only 31 percent globally and 41 percent of Swedes and 38 percent of Singaporeans share this belief about their own countries. […]

India Energy Transition: Who will lead?

By 2070, India will go from spewing 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually to none at all — a near nirvana like, post-industrial wonderland called “Net Zero” — when a country’s carbon emissions from humans, animals and decaying plants equal the amount of carbon that forests and trees absorb to grow. Any additional emissions […]

Creative Disruption or Murder of Democracy?

The “One Nation, One Election” (ONOE) proposal of the BJP is in the best traditions of zero-based budgeting, where nothing is off the table, so long as it makes sense and is profitable. Clearly, the BJP sees gains in the conflation of national and state-level elections, before four large states precede the Lok Sabha to […]

Mapping India’s Poor

The government did well to publish the NITI Aayog Report on Multidimensional Poverty (2019-21), highlighting the decline in the poverty headcount from around 24.85 percent in 2015-16 to 14.96 percent in 2019–2021—showcasing a substantial fall from the earlier survey outcomes. Both are based on the data collected during the standardised National Health Status Reports for the […]

Unshackling Indian Criminal Law or Rebranding it?

The Union home minister has said he wants to unshackle India from its colonial legacy by proposing to repeal three long-standing laws and to substitute them with three bills that were tabled in Parliament last week. Lest the public be misled into believing that this is just old wine in new bottles, he hastened to […]

A Bright Red Line Between Social and private costs and Benfits

In India, biomass—the fallen leaves in your garden, crop residue at your farm, organic garbage, and waste from your house—are just shy of around one third of the available primary energy, mostly in rural areas, where agricultural residue is generated. Some of it is collected and stored for later use. Burning biomass in a cook […]

Decarbonisation Vignettes

Differential time horizons for net zero imply that there is no universal price for mitigating carbon emissions. Decarbonisation plans are proliferating globally, including in India. First came the plan to electrify vehicles, even before electricity supply standards had reached international levels of 0.999 reliability. Next, the near-term goal of having 50 percent of electrical energy […]

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