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Does subsidising publicly provided services discipline markets or distort demand?

Prior research has documented the failure of India’s flagship safe motherhood programme in reducing perinatal mortality, despite substantially increasing the share of mothers delivering at public he...

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Did Covid-19 pandemic increase incidence of low-birth-weight among newborns?

Globally, one in four babies are born with low birth weight, with long-term impacts on health and economic outcomes. This article uses Indian data from 2019-2021 to analyse the impact of the Covid-19 ...

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India’s massive employment problem and some ways out

In the recent announcement of India’s Union Budget 2024-25, significant emphasis was placed on the need for job creation. In this post, Pranab Bardhan presents a four-pronged strategy for the sustai...

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Access to clean drinking water and women’s safety in India

In this study, Sekhri and Hossain use district-level data to find empirical evidence that groundwater scarcity results in an increase in sexual violence against women. They argue that in households wi...

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Foundational learning outcomes: More recovery than loss

Sharing data from the recently released ASER 2022, Wilima Wadhwa discusses the trends in primary school enrollment and learning during the pandemic. Using data collected from Karnataka, Chhattisgarh a...

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Herself, and her child: Are they worse off due to Covid-19?

Lockdowns imposed to contain the spread of Covid-19 led to loss of employment and income. They also created greater food insecurity, with women and children being more vulnerable to such shocks. In t...

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Old habits and new norms

As schools reopen and memories of the pandemic fade, Madhav Chavan takes stock of practices and ideas that have become the ‘new normal’. He highlights the increase in enrollment and absence of lea...

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Sweet cash: Women’s demand for healthcare in developing countries

Agrawal et al. explore the role of gender-based preferences for demand of healthcare. Using CPHS data they find that the positive income shock – generated by a change in the mandated rates of contri...

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Empowering patients with information to improve hospital accountability

Despite the expansion of free healthcare for the poor throughout India, many hospitals continue to charge patients out-of-pocket fees. In this study, Dupas and Jain investigate whether informing patie...

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The unintended positive consequences of India’s safe motherhood programme

India’s flagship maternal health intervention, Janani Suraksha Yojana, provided conditional cash transfers to women opting for institutional deliveries. In this study, Chatterjee and Poddar document...

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Low-tech and teacher support interventions during school closures

School closures during Covid-19 significantly impacted early childhood education, especially in households without sufficient parental engagement. Using data from households affiliated with Balwadis a...

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A data story on female child marriage in India

In the eighth post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Shubham Mudgil and Swathi Rao from The Quantum Hub use a novel dataset based on NFHS-5 to present data highl...

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Time poverty for girls: Implications for educational attainment and workforce participation

In the fifth post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Priyadarshini et al. leverage time use data from a study in Bihar, and find that girls take on a majority of ...

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Understanding intergenerational educational mobility with conflicting evidence

There is a growing literature on intergenerational educational mobility that explores how parental education influences the educational attainment of children. This article compares three empirical mo...

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Is open defecation still prevalent in rural north India?

In an attempt to understand open defecation in four focus states in the aftermath of the Swachh Bharat Mission, Vyas and Gupta evaluate the findings of the NFHS-5. They note that the NFHS is likely to...

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Gaurav Chiplunkar

University of Virginia

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Erin M. Kelley

World Bank

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Gregory Lane

University of Chicago

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Kumar Ashutosh

Krea University

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Manini Ojha

Jindal School of Government and Public Policy

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Mehreen Mookerjee

Zayed University, Dubai

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American University, Sharjah

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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...

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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.

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Understanding India’s mental health crisis

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, several reports have indicated a worsening of mental health issues among individuals across age groups. In this post, Michele Mary Bernadine examines the stat...

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