Oxford University Press Book Series: Institutions and Development in South Asia
About the IDSA Series
This series, published by Oxford University Press, interrogates the interplay between globalization, the state, and social forces in the making and un-making of institutions in South Asia. Why do institutions persist and change? Do we need to transcend materialism and dwell in ideas and culture as well to understand why institutions perform and fail?
Recent Issue:
Public Financial Management, State Capacity, and Public Services in India
Authors: Santhosh Mathew, Bhumi Purohit, Devesh Sharma
Series Editor: Rahul Mukherji
Despite well-funded and well-designed public programmes, service delivery often falls short of expectations. While existing research highlights various political economy challenges, this book uncovers a critical yet underexplored factor: the architecture of public finance, specifically expenditure management systems. Drawing on literature, field experience, and primary data from government officials and citizens, the book argues that India’s public financial management system has made good progress. However, persistent governance challenges, including float, corruption, fund delays for public programmes, poor auditing quality, and poor data availability for transparency to stakeholders remain. These challenges arise from two key problems: the fiscal and policy-level data across systems do not always speak to each other, and the data these systems produce aren’t available to those who need them. After expanding on such challenges, the book then proposes a set of transformations which, if implemented, has the potential to strengthen India’s public financial management system and enable better public service delivery. This approach seeks to provide real-time access to both funds and data on fund allocation, ensuring responsiveness to stakeholders’ needs. By redefining public finance beyond its traditional accounting and auditing role, the book presents a framework for expanding expenditure capacity and improving service delivery.
Published: 16 March 2026 by Oxford University Press
About the Previous Issues
Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act in India
Author: Himanshu Jha Series Editors: Rahul Mukherjee, Subrata K. Mitra, Raghbendra Jha
The first book in the Institutions and Development in South Asia series, Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act in India (OUP: New Delhi, 2020) by Dr Himanshu Jha tudies the information regime in India from an alternative historical institutional perspective. It examines the what, why, and how of institutional change through the lens of transformation in the ‘information regime’ in India by tracing the passage of the Right to Information Act (RTIA), 2005. Using archival material, internal government documents, and interviews, the author demonstrates that the institutional change resulted from ‘ideas’ emerging gradually and incrementally, leading to a ‘tipping point’.
