Main Banner Image
Miscellany

On the perils of embedded experiments

  • Perspectives

I4I@10: Annual lecture and panel discussion

We invite you to join us on 22 December, 2022, as we bring to you Ideas for India’s annual lecture and panel discussion to celebrate 10 years of I4I! Featuring an in-person meeting for the first tim...

  • Editors Corner

Role of history in shaping India’s economic development

As India is now completing 75 years of Independence, two big questions loom over the conversation around India’s economic development: How successful was the Indian economy before and during colonia...

  • Podcasts

Left and right: Examining the evolution of political ideologies

With the advent of globalisation, the struggle between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ – as defined in Marxian terms – rapidly evolved from one between economic ideologies, to cultural wars. In thi...

  • Videos
Refine list by:
--Please Select--
--Please Select--

Obituary: Dr Shaibal Gupta

Dr Shaibal Gupta, IGC India’s Bihar programme head, sadly passed away on 28 January 2021. He was one of India’s pre-eminent social scientists, widely regarded as the leading expert on the economic...

  • Articles

I4I 2020 highlights: Note from the Editor-in-Chief

As we near the end of 2020, Editor-in-chief Ashok Kotwal reflects on the unprecedented and momentous year that was, and presents key highlights from I4I.

  • Perspectives

Phone survey methodology for social and economic research in India

Data collection using face-to-face surveys has faced a roadblock in the wake of restricted mobility and social distancing guidelines to contain the spread of Covid-19. In this post, Coffey et al. desc...

  • Perspectives

Covid-19: Journey of a construction firm through the lockdown

To check the spread of Covid-19, Government of India announced a stringent, three-week national lockdown on 25 March 2020 – with some easing of restrictions in subsequent phases. This note chronicle...

  • Notes from the Field

RCTs for policymaking: Ethical and methodological considerations

The last decade has seen an increased adoption of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) for answering policy questions in developing countries. RCTs are being preferred over other research methods mainl...

  • Perspectives

Doing our bidding: Auctions and the greater common good

This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. In this post, Parikshit Ghosh discus...

  • Perspectives

In the eyes of the beholder: How artisans set prices for their products

The developing world is replete with people working in low-income, but creative occupations, such as artisanship. However, little is concretely known about how they set prices for their products. Base...

  • Articles

Covid-19 lockdown and criminal activity: Evidence from Bihar

The lockdown imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic has had wide-ranging consequences for the society. This article analyses the impact of the lockdown on criminal activity in Bihar using up-to-date p...

  • Articles

The institutional partnership model: Embedding evidence into the policy equation

One path for capitalising on government interest in evidence-informed policymaking is for the research community to build long-term institutional partnerships with governments to create an ecosystem w...

  • Notes from the Field

The SHRUG: A new high-resolution data platform for research on India

The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India (SHRUG) is a new data source that describes socioeconomic development in India. In this post, Asher, Lunt, and Novosad describ...

  • Perspectives

Death penalty for gender-based violence: A band-aid solution for a broken system

In 2018, Government of India amended the Protection of Children against Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 and the Indian Penal Code to provide for death penalty for rape of children under 12 years of ...

  • Perspectives

Note from I4I Team: Happy Holidays!

We are now closed for Christmas and New Year, until Thursday, 2 January 2020. We will be back in the New Year with new articles, perspectives, notes from the field, e-symposia, explainers, videos, and...

  • Perspectives

Recent Contributors

I4I

I4I Team

Ideas for India

Chirantan

Chirantan Chatterjee

University of Sussex

Anindya

Anindya Chakrabarti

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

Matthew

Matthew J. Higgins

University of Utah

Amartya

Amartya Lahiri

University of British Columbia

Jean

Jean Drèze

Ranchi University; Delhi School of Economics

Amey

Amey Sapre

National Institute of Public Finance and Policy

Harshvardhan

Harshvardhan Singh Garhwal

Indian Statistical Service

View all Contributors

Most Popular Miscellany Posts

Evidence, policy, and politics

Commenting on the concept of evidence-based policy, Jean Drèze argues that the relation between evidence and policy needs further thought. Based on his involvement with social policy in India, he bel...

  • Perspectives

On the perils of embedded experiments

There is growing interest in ‘embedded experiments’, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they se...

  • Perspectives

The particulars of social policy in India: Evidence, State capacity, and policy design

Economist-activist Jean Drèze has argued that economists are no better equipped to comment on development policy design than other social science researchers and other stakeholders, and that policyma...

  • Perspectives