27 November, 2019The long-term consequences of medical missions in colonial India
Health outcomes vary substantially across India. Is this variation exclusively determined by present-day factors, or can it be traced back to historical events? This article studies the long-term cons...
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Rossella Calvi Federico Mantovanelli 
27 February, 2019
- Articles
Does it pay to speak English in India?
There is a widely held belief that there are sizeable economic returns to English-language skills in India. This column seeks to estimate the wage returns to English skills in India. It is found that ...
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Mehtabul Azam Aimee Chin Nishith Prakash
- 20 September, 2013
- Articles
Social protection in the Union Budget 2019
In this post, Sudha Narayanan analyses the provisions pertaining to social protection in the Union Budget 2019. She contends that while the budgetary figures give the impression that the Government is...
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Sudha Narayanan
- 10 July, 2019
- Perspectives
Maternity entitlements for healthier babies
The National Food Security Act, 2013 provides for a maternity benefit of not less than Rs. 6,000 for every pregnant and lactating mother in India. In this article, Coffey and Hathi explain why materni...
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Diane Coffey Payal Hathi
- 07 July, 2016
- Perspectives
The growing problem of excess weight in India
The Indian population is increasingly becoming overweight or obese, and this phenomenon is likely to impose a considerable health burden in the future. Analysing data from the Indian Human Development...
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Pushkar Maitra Nidhiya Menon
- 27 June, 2016
- Articles
Ensuring access to medicines through PPPs
To address the issue of low access to basic medicines by the general public, the state government of West Bengal introduced Fair Price Medicine Shops in secondary and tertiary hospitals through a Publ...
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Satarupa Bandyopadhyay Arijita Dutta
- 24 June, 2016
- Articles
India's informal doctors: Assets, not crooks
Informal healthcare providers are the most common, and sometimes the only source of healthcare, in much of rural India. In this article, Jishnu Das of the World Bank argues that informal providers sho...
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Jishnu Das
- 13 June, 2016
- Articles
What are schools worth?
Since large-scale expansions in education impact both individual behaviours and labour markets, convincing causal estimates of their overall benefits are hard to generate. Analysing the overall econom...
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Gaurav Khanna
- 01 June, 2016
- Articles
Early life nutrition and future educational outcomes: Findings from ICDS
Integrated Child Development Services – India’s flagship child nutrition programme – has recently suffered a major cut in funding. This column shows that supplementary nutrition provided under t...
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Ramanan Laxminarayan Arindam Nandi
- 25 April, 2016
- Articles
Public health insurance for tertiary diseases: Lessons from Andhra's Aarogyasri programme
Private health insurance covering tertiary diseases is limited to the upper middle class in India. One reason for low take-up of publicly-financed health insurance among economically weaker sections i...
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Tarun Jain
- 12 April, 2016
- Articles
The less the merrier? Family size and education in India
In the face of financial constraints, children from larger families are expected to have relatively less education and poor health. This column explores the empirical relevance this ‘quantity-qualit...
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Adriana Kugler Santosh Kumar
- 01 April, 2016
- Articles
Social influences and public health insurance utilisation
In developing countries there are often limited formal sources of information about programme benefits or how to access them. Social networks might influence adoption by providing more programme inf...
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Tarun Jain
- 31 March, 2016
- IGC Research on India
Causes and consequences of low caloric intake in India: Nutrition, productivity, and cognition
Many of the world’s poor consume very few calories. Because calories are not just consumption, but also an input into production, this low consumption may dampen labour productivity and impede decis...
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Sendhil Mullainathan Heather Schofield
- 31 March, 2016
- IGC Research on India
Self-reported health data: Issues and solutions
Health data from the National Sample Survey shows an increase in morbidity in India over the years. However, given that the data is self-reported, it is difficult to ascertain whether this indeed refl...
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Aparajita Dasgupta
- 23 March, 2016
- Articles
Improving maternal and child health through conditional cash transfers
Cash transfers to the poor, conditional on use of particular public services, are a popular tool to increase healthcare utilisation. This column evaluates the impact of one such scheme – Janani Sura...
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Sisir Debnath
- 21 March, 2016
- Articles
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Human Development Posts
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...
- Abhijeet Singh
- 14 April, 2014
- 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.
- Sridhar Rajagopalan
- 19 November, 2015
- Perspectives
A quiet revolution: The case of primary education in Uttar Pradesh
The challenge in India’s school education system today is how to translate years of schooling into learning. While there is reason to lament the learning crisis, a quiet movement is taking place in ...
- Shobhini Mukerji
- 31 May, 2019
- Notes