15 March, 2024India’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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Akshara Gopalan Urvashi Wattal 
15 December, 2023
- Perspectives
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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Chinmaya Kumar M.R. Sharan
- 28 November, 2023
- Articles
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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Siwan Anderson
- 30 March, 2023
- Perspectives
Do awareness programmes on TV help change prejudices?
Awareness-based TV programmes, such as Satya Mev Jayate hosted by Bollywood film personality Aamir Khan, aim to change deep-seated prejudices of the society. To what extent do such programmes influenc...
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Ritwik Banerjee Nabanita Datta Gupta
- 24 November, 2014
- Articles
How gender-inclusive is MNREGA in practice?
MNREGA mandates that a third of all workers under the programme should be women. But how gender inclusive has the implementation of the Act been? This column uses nationally representative data to an...
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Upasak Das
- 21 November, 2014
- Perspectives
Did caste-based reservation increase schooling of beneficiaries?
Reservation for backward classes in schools has been in place in India since independence. This column uses a unique historical event that took place in the 1970s in India to evaluate the effect of a...
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Guilhem Cassan
- 16 October, 2014
- Articles
Social Identity and Aspirations
The project is a field experiment in India that investigates whether the norms associated with one’s social identity affect one’s aspirations, beliefs, and eventual outcomes. Project exploits cues...
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Priya Mukherjee
- 31 July, 2014
- IGC Research on India
Tell us what you really think: Measuring gender attitudes in Haryana
Changing basic gender attitudes may be crucial for alleviating discrimination against women and improving gender outcomes. This column describes a unique measurement tool developed by social psycholo...
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Diva Dhar Tarun Jain Seema Jayachandran
- 18 July, 2014
- Articles
Religion, minority status, and trust
A key factor that drives segmentation in societies is group identities along various dimensions. This column seeks to understand the effects of identity on individual behaviour. Based on an artefactu...
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Minhaj Mahmud Pushkar Maitra Ananta Neelim
- 14 May, 2014
- Articles
Quotas and schooling decisions
Affirmative action, as an instrument for bridging inequalities across social groups, has been a contentious issue for decades. This column analyses the impact of reservation in public sector jobs and...
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Gaurav Khanna
- 03 April, 2014
- Articles
Do wives care more about household welfare than husbands?
Social science literature shows that women promote household welfare more than men. This column examines if consumption choices of husbands and wives change, depending on whether they have to work to...
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Utteeyo Dasgupta Subha Mani
- 24 February, 2014
- Articles
Rape: The shame of a nation
The proliferating number of rape incidents in India is chilling. This column discusses the various perspectives on the causes of rape, and the economic, social and legal factors that play a role in t...
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Chandan Kumar Jha Sudipta Sarangi
- 21 February, 2014
- Articles
Why so few women in politics in India?
Women are severely under-represented in political positions across the world. This column analyses constituency-level election data from Indian states to explore why this is so. It finds that while w...
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Mudit Kapoor Shamika Ravi
- 02 January, 2014
- Articles
How backward are 'Other Backward Classes' in India?
Since reservations were provided in government bodies for lower castes in the early 90s, ‘Other Backward Classes’ have been an important force in Indian politics at all levels. Has there been a c...
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Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 04 December, 2013
- Articles
What explains the stagnation of female labour force participation in urban India?
Over the past two decades, urban India has experienced expansion in women’s education, fertility decline and growth in white-collared jobs. Then why is it that female labour force participation has ...
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Stephan Klasen Janneke Pieters
- 27 September, 2013
- Articles
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost 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...
- Guilhem Cassan Daniel Keniston Tatjana Kleineberg
- 18 November, 2022
- Articles
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...
- Swati Narayan
- 03 April, 2019
- Articles
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...
- Pallabi Das Saswata Ghosh
- 18 April, 2023
- Articles