Editorial : Profile

Posts by Farzana Afridi

Webinar: Impact of Covid-19 on informal and migrant workers in India

The International Growth Centre (IGC), in collaboration with I4I, organised a Webinar on 'The impact of Covid-19 on informal and migrant workers in India', with Jean Drèze (Ranchi University), Farzan...

How has Covid-19 crisis affected the urban poor? Findings from a phone survey - I

While several commentators have highlighted the plight of migrants due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, less is known about how low-income families living in urban shanty towns are faring. In this note...

Women in the economy: Emerging issues

As the world adjusts to the new reality brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the workspaces of the future may look very different from what they are today. How would these changes impact women? To bet...

Providing information on school quality in a dysfunctional public education system

Insufficient school accountability and limited parental awareness of school quality can result in poor learning outcomes of students. This article reports the results of a randomised experiment in rur...

Fostering social connections

This column describes an ongoing study that analyses data from Delhi’s labour-intensive garment factories to explore the relationship between trust among workers and productivity. Using the strength...

Introduction to e-Symposium: Firms and labour productivity

Eighty per cent of India’s labour force works ‘informally’. Providing employment with decent wages and benefits to this segment requires structural transformation of the economy to more high-pr...

Governance and public service delivery in India

The International Growth Centre recently produced a synthesis paper (Afridi 2017) bringing together insights from its research on governance and public service delivery in India, over the past seven y...

Declining female labour force participation in rural India: The supply side

Analysis of National Sample Survey data shows that low rates of female labour force participation in India are concentrated among married women in rural areas. This column suggests that this is partl...

Introduction to e-Symposium: Women and work in India

Female labour force participation in India has been low and stagnant over the past few decades. I4I Editor Farzana Afridi is hosting an e-symposium to examine research that explores the reasons for t...

Women and work in rural India

In contrast to the global average of 48%, only 32.6% of the half-a-billion working-age women in India report to be working. It is puzzling that the rapid fertility transition, broad increases in femal...

Afterword: What lies ahead for MNREGA?

In an afterword to the e-symposium on ‘10 years of MNREGA and the way forward’, I4I Editor Farzana Afridi contends that the evidence summarised in the e-symposium suggests that MNREGA is not merel...

Introduction to e-Symposium: 10 years of MNREGA and the way forward

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme – the largest public works programme in the world – completed a decade in February 2016. As a contribution to the discussions, ...