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Posts by Rohini Somanathan

Prof. Rohini Somanathan remembers Prof. Ashok Kotwal

Prof Rohini Somanathan pens a heartfelt tribute to our founder Editor-in-Chief Ashok Kotwal.

  • Perspectives

Covid-19: A tailor’s tale

This note presents a narrative that is based on an interview conducted on 15 April with a tailor who walked most of the way from Jaipur to his home in Farrukhabad district in Uttar Pradesh, after the ...

  • Notes from the Field

T.N., fondly remembered

Prof. T.N. Srinivasan, an acclaimed Indian economist and Professor Emeritus at Yale University, passed away on 11 November in Chennai. In this post, Prof. Rohini Somanathan of the Delhi School of Econ...

  • Perspectives

Malnutrition and the National Food Security Act

The National Food Security Act aims to remove hunger and reduce malnutrition by providing subsidised foodgrains to two-thirds of the population. Using nationally representative data, this column finds...

  • Articles

The Effects of Food Policy on Cropping Patterns and Income Distribution in Rural Bihar

Bihar is unusual among the Indian states in the extent to which it remains a rural economy; government food policy can have profound effects on the level and distribution of income in Bihar. The objec...

  • IGC Research on India

The battle for backwardness

Ahead of the assembly elections in Punjab, the state government granted ‘Other Backward Classes’ status to Rajput Sikhs. In this article, Rohini Somanathan contends that caste reservations first ...

  • Perspectives

Nobel insights: When it comes to contracts, what's obvious may not be optimal

In a tribute to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström, recipients of this year’s Nobel prize in Economics, Rohini Somanathan, Professor of Economics at Delhi School of Economics, outlines their contribut...

  • Perspectives

The right to shelter: An evaluation of the land transfer programme to Mahadalits in Bihar

This project follows the implementation of a land distribution scheme towards Mahadalit households in Bihar, the most oppressed of the Scheduled Castes in the state. It aims to describe which Mahadali...

  • IGC Research on India

Socially disadvantaged groups and microfinance in India

The benefits of microfinance are in the details. This column takes a look at lending by commercial banks in India to self-help groups – smaller, informal community-based groups – as a new and succ...

  • Perspectives

Religion and relief in Muzzafarnagar

The communal riots that broke out in Muzzafarnagar in the state of Uttar Pradesh in September last year took several lives and left hundreds homeless. In this Note from the Field, Rohini Somanathan s...

  • Notes from the Field

Evaluating the Effects of Targeted Transfers to 'Mahadalits' in Bihar

The aim of this project is to examine how the transfer of assets to ultra-poor households under different Mahadalit inititatives influences their sense of well-being and their notions of identity. The...

  • IGC Research on India

Incorporating Public Good Availability into the Measure of Poverty

This project makes an attempt to incorporate benefits from unpaid public services into consumption decisions to arrive at more accurate measures of poverty and inequality. The project considered thre...

  • IGC Research on India