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India’s Women’s Reservation Act: A big win for governance and beyond

Amidst debates about the recently passed women's reservation act and whether it will reduce gender disparities on the ground, Wattal and Gopalan summarise evidence from a number of randomised evaluati...

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The distributional consequences of political reservations

This article identifies and attempts to fill in the gaps in understanding the effects of reservations for Scheduled Castes (SCs) in Panchayats. Using data from a state-wide census, multiple administra...

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The complexity of female empowerment interventions

In the final post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Siwan Anderson unpacks the complex dimensions and interactions between measures of female empowerment. She hi...

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Missing unmarried women

The developing world has notoriously low sex ratios, a phenomenon that has been described as ‘missing women’. This is believed to be driven by parental preferences for sons, sex-selective abortion...

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Role model effects? Women's political participation in India

Women’s political candidacy in India is very low and appears to be an important barrier to their representation in government. Does a deficiency of female role models hold back women’s candidacy?...

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Property rights, household conflict and suicide in India

Suicide has become the second leading cause of death among young Indians. This column finds that improved inheritance rights for women are associated with an increase in the incidence of suicide amon...

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Religion and health in early childhood: Evidence from South Asia

The widespread malnutrition of children in South Asia is persistent and troubling. Given the importance of religion in the region, this column examines the relationship between inequalities in child ...

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Women's empowerment and child malnutrition in rural India

Research has found mother’s empowerment to have a positive impact on the nutrition status of their children. This column analyses this relationship for data from rural India for the period 1992-200...

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Women's economic empowerment and domestic violence

The safety of women in India – both inside and outside homes – is a major concern. This column explores the link between women’s economic empowerment, in the form of stronger inheritance rights...

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Impact of the two-child limit for local politicians

Some Indian states debar individuals with more than two children from contesting local elections. This column finds that while the law has significantly reduced fertility among the general population...

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Enhancing women's participation in water governance

Women’s participation has become a key theme in water and sanitation projects. However, projects that have made provisions for women’s participation have yielded mixed results in terms of the qua...

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Women leaders and deceptive behaviour

Are women in leadership positions more dishonest than men? Based on an artefactual field experiment in rural Bihar, this column finds that women in leadership positions deceive more than men, especia...

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Does affirmative action reduce productivity? The case of Indian Railways

Critics of job reservations argue that such policies have an adverse effect on work efficiency and productivity. This column analyses the effect of job reservations in the Indian Railways – the wor...

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Social Justice in Education: Are School Uniform and Scholarship Schemes Marred with Discrimination in Bihar?

This project evaluated on how well the attendance conditionality is being implemented in the schools of Bihar, and whether it’s marred with caste-based discrimination. The study found that the atte...

  • IGC Research on India

Keeping women safe

Since the December 2012 rape incident in Delhi, numerous policies have been proposed to stop the “war on women”. In this article, Rohini Pande discusses economic research, including her own, on t...

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Sarah Vincent

Aix Marseille School of Economics

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Aditi Singh

University of British Columbia

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Ashoka University

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Indian Institute of Management Indore

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Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3)

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Madhu Joshi

Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3)

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Shubha Bhattacharya

Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3)

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Most Popular Social Identity Posts

A division of labourers: Caste identity and efficiency in India

Castes in India are closely associated with certain occupations and determine the jobs done by millions. This study uses a new dataset to show that a large proportion of workers still work in their ca...

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Sex ratios and religion in India and South Asia

In South Asia, low child sex ratios are increasingly an isolated Indian phenomenon. Within India, child sex ratios are ‘normal’ among Christians and Muslims but much lower among Hindus, Sikhs, and...

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Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials in India: An update

Building on past research, Saswata Ghosh and Pallabi Das estimate the state- and district-level fertility differentials between Hindus and Muslims using data from the latest round of the NFHS. They sh...

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