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Human Development

Common tongue? How mother tongue instruction influences education

  • Perspectives

The State’s frontline workers: An overlooked human resource

The Covid-19 and the related lockdown have focused the nation's attention on two groups of people who number in millions but have still somehow not received adequate attention: the migrant informal wo...

  • Notes from the Field

India’s battle against Covid-19: A comparative perspective

It has been suggested that, India could selectively relax the lockdown that has been imposed on it, given its favourable demographic profile. In this post, Ghosh and Pal argue that having a younger po...

  • Perspectives

Gender composition of children and sanitation behaviour

Open defecation has been linked to various public health issues and has gained significant policy attention. Nonetheless, research has shown that due to son preference, households in India underinvest...

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Designing incentives for mid-level officials in India's public sector

In the Indian public education system, block/cluster resource persons are mid-level officials who are responsible for monitoring the performance of teachers. In this note, Vivek et al. discuss their e...

  • Notes from the Field

Does early motherhood impact the development of children?

According to a new UNFPA report, the Covid-19 pandemic might cause 13 million additional child marriages – a key driver of early motherhood. Using panel data from South India, this article shows tha...

  • Articles

Preferences or expectations? Understanding the gender gap in choice of college majors

A multidisciplinary literature – mostly focused on the US – shows that choice of majors among college students is gendered, and females are particularly under-represented in math-intensive fields....

  • Articles

Teacher accountability: Non-teaching work over classroom engagement

While the Right to Education Act, 2009 mandates 200 days of teaching for primary classes, the actual number seems to be much lower in government schools. Based on qualitative fieldwork and a survey in...

  • Notes from the Field

Locked out of critical care: Covid-19 lockdown and non-Covid mortality

India’s 10-week long national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 was among the most severe in the world. This article investigates the effects of the lockdown restrictions on healthcare acce...

  • Articles

Covid-19: How the pandemic evolved in Kerala over the 'unlock' phases

Kerala, the state with the largest number of Covid-19 cases when India entered the lockdown on 25 March, had only 16 active cases on 20 May. However, the second wave of the pandemic in the state, coin...

  • Perspectives

On India’s ‘low’ Covid-19 case fatality rate

India’s Covid-19 case fatality rate is impressively low at 1.7%, compared to the world average of 4%. This apparently superior performance could, however, simply be a product of three factors: the c...

  • Articles

Integrating technology into education systems: Lessons from Jharkhand

Ideas to improve the performance of India’s school system, many of which involve the use of information and communication technology, have been proposed and implemented with varying degrees of succe...

  • Notes from the Field

School choice in rural India: Perception versus reality

School choice has increased significantly in India – with growth of low-fee private schools – and this is considered important within a market-based approach to schooling. Based on a field study a...

  • Articles

How birth weight affects test scores during mid-childhood years

Besides lack of schooling resources, a possible reason why children grapple with low learning outcomes may be poor health at birth. Analysing data from Andhra Pradesh, this article finds that a 10% i...

  • Articles

Can greater access to education be inequitable?

Right to Education Act, 2009, was designed to provide the right to free, quality school education to all 6-14 year olds in India. This article examines the influence of RTE on the expansion of private...

  • Articles

Disparity in access to quality education and the digital divide

On account of the Covid-19 pandemic, most educational institutions in India have adopted online teaching as a solution to offset huge deficits in instruction hours. However, citizens who do not have d...

  • Perspectives

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Stefan Klonner

Heidelberg University

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Sumantra Pal

Indian Economic Service

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Christiane Schwieren

Heidelberg University

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Andaleeb Rahman

Cornell University

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Deepak Malghan

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

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Naveen Bharathi

University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University

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Sumit Mishra

Institute for Financial Management and Research

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Reetika Khera

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

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Most Popular Human Development Posts

Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials in India: District-level estimates from Census 2011

The 2011 Indian Census data show a higher growth rate of Muslim population compared to the Hindu population. This article provides an in-depth picture of Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials at the di...

  • Articles

Giving up too early on malnourished children? Catch-up growth and Midday Meals

It is widely believed that malnourishment in the first few years of childhood adversely affects cognition and adult economic outcomes. This column presents new research which shows that full recovery...

  • Articles

Ten steps to transform the quality of education in India

In this article, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director of Educational Initiatives, suggests 10 initiatives that can help transform the quality of education in India.

  • Perspectives