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Human Development

To invest in sanitation or not? The role of gender differences in perceptions

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Access to health insurance in India: Direct and spillover effects

Many low-income households in India have been pushed into poverty by high healthcare costs. Uptake of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, the government-run national health insurance programme for bel...

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Assessing the extent and fiscal cost of teacher shortages in India

The New Education Policy has proposed that the one million teacher vacancies in public elementary schools be filled imperatively. Using 2019-20 District Information System for Education (u-DISE) data,...

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How RSBY impacted healthcare utilisation and spending

Social Health Insurance seeks to protect the poor from high health spending, and encourage healthcare utilisation. Analysing 2004-05 and 2011-12 Indian Human Development Survey data, this article find...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Can India improve its public schools? Research says yes

An important policy question is whether the quality of public schools can be improved enough to effectively increase student outcomes. This article examines the effects of a natural experiment to crea...

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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...

  • Perspectives