Desai & Associates and Villgro Innovations Foundation are proud to announce the release of their groundbreaking white paper titled, 'A Practitioner's Guide to Effective Blended Finance Solutions for Social Enterprises.' Supported by the Lemelson Foundation, this white paper presents the key barriers and opportunities to scaling blended finance solutions for social enterprises and SMEs in India and bridge the financing gap faced by them.

This paper is about the looming water crisis in India as a scarce and threatened resource has to meet rising demand. The crisis that is looming in India’s water systems is not just one of demand supply imbalance. It is crisis that is the product of short-term considerations dominating political discourse and economic policy.

Asian countries differ greatly in the options available and the constraints that bind their energy prospects. West and North-West Asia are energy rich with huge reserves of oil and gas in the Gulf region and in the Central Asian “stans”. The part of Asia which lies to the East and South of these areas, call it Monsoon Asia for convenience, is energy poor, particularly in petroleum resources. Hence to speak about ‘Asian’ imperatives when it comes to energy and climate change is misleading. In any case ‘Asia’ is only a geographical expression and, as an idea, has played only a minor role, if any, in shaping geo-political perceptions in the region. This contribution focuses mainly on energy options in Monsoon Asia, particularly India and China

Economic, social and environmental factors can be looked at as the cause of conflict, as conditions that shape the direction and duration of conflict and as consequences of conflict. It is important to keep these dimensions of relevance in mind as they have different implications for policy and institutional development. Thus a dispute over natural resources could be the cause of a conflict, trade in natural resources may provide the resources to fuel a conflict or conflict may disrupt the paths of trade. The paper analyses economic instruments from these three perspectives