Rapid advances in digital technologies have changed the landscape of developmental interventions and policies. Digitisation can lower transaction costs, raise efficiency and improve labour productivity. It also promotes social and economic inclusion and its benefits go beyond pure economic returns. E-governance has been adopted as a mantra to improve public service delivery. However, with vast chunks of population still undigitised, challenges remain. Our focus is to understand how technology is being used and can be used to overcome developmental challenges. What are the barriers to adoption? How do individuals and institutions relate to technology and how does adoption change their lives and behaviour? .

With half our population between the ages of 15 and 44, India is sitting on a huge demographic resource to take advantage of a knowledge-based economy. But this demographic dividend only pays if this population has the education and skills required to succeed in the new economy. At present India has a poorly educated and poorly skilled labour force. What is it that can be done to improve the quantity and quality of education and skilling of our youth? Our programme aims to understand the reasons for the current levels of human capital and design and test solutions targeted
at improving these levels.

Regulatory and legal frameworks shape economic outcomes by structuring incentives, defining market boundaries, and influencing firm behaviour. In the Indian context, policy interventions often generate outcomes that diverge from their stated objectives due to gaps in anticipating how individuals and firms respond to regulatory change. These mismatches can produce distortions in market functioning, raise compliance costs, and undermine regulatory credibility. 

The Ambedkar Centre for Law and Economics, established in 2015 within IDF, was created to address governance challenges at the intersection of legal design and economic outcomes. The Centre was the natural outcome of IDF’s previous work with CCI when it was being established as India’s competition authority. IDF developed primers for CCI detailing the economics of regulation grounded in the industrial organization literature. The Centre’s objective continues to be to bridge the gap in India between doctrinal legal analysis and analytical economic reasoning, with the aim of enabling more predictable regulation and more effective institutions.

 
The Centre advances policy design by systematically integrating legal doctrine with economic analysis to evaluate the intended and unintended effects of regulatory interventions. This involves examining how policies operate in practice — how firms adjust behaviour, how markets reorganize, and where regulatory objectives may be diluted or offset. By bringing an ex-ante and ex-post analytical lens to regulation, the Centre seeks to improve the quality of policy design and contribute to more robust, evidence-informed governance.