Contributor : Profile

Posts by Farzana Afridi

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Symposium

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...

  • Perspectives

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Symposium

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...

  • IGC Research on India

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...

  • Articles

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, ...

  • Symposium

Has community monitoring helped reduce corruption in public programme delivery?

MNREGA mandates social audits of public work projects undertaken under the Act in order to empower beneficiaries to scrutinise programme expenditures, and monitor programme delivery. Has community mo...

  • Articles

Does political reservation for women improve programme delivery?

This column outlines results of a study that assesses the impact of women leaders on corruption and other aspects of the quality of delivery of MNREGA. It argues that administrative experience, traini...

  • Articles

Food for thought: On the design of school subsidy programmes

Despite significant increase in primary school enrollments, student attendance rates are less than 70% in public schools. This column argues that India needs to start evaluating its existing school su...

  • Articles