The man who loved forests
On Ideas for India’s 10th anniversary, our Editor-in-Chief Parikshit Ghosh pens a tribute honouring the late Ashok Kotwal, whose vision and values percolated our portal’s character to make it a ve...
- Parikshit Ghosh
- 19 July, 2022
- Editors Corner
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...
- Jean Drèze
- 10 March, 2022
- Perspectives
Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize winning research
On Sunday, Claudia Goldin will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on women’s progress in the workforce. In this piece, Farzana Afridi reflects on the significance of Goldin...
- Farzana Afridi
- 08 December, 2023
- Perspectives
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...
- Pranab Bardhan Ashok Kotwal
- 16 September, 2021
- Videos
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...
- Pranab Bardhan Ashok Kotwal
- 16 September, 2021
- Podcasts
Under the thumb of history?
In June 2021, Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee (Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, MIT) delivered the inaugural Shaibal Gupta Memorial Lecture organised by Asian Development Research...
- Abhijit Banerjee
- 13 August, 2021
- Podcasts
I4I at 10: Zooming over the last nine years, and looking ahead
As ‘Ideas for India’ enters its 10th year, Editor-in-Chief Ashok Kotwal reflects on its growth as a credible, ideologically neutral, and accessible platform for evidence-based policy analysis, and...
- Ashok Kotwal
- 30 July, 2021
- Perspectives
Information provision and food safety: A field study in urban India
While street food accounts for a significant proportion of the daily food consumption of millions of people, the reliability and safety of these food supply chains remain a key public health concern. ...
- Gianmarco Daniele Sulagna Mookerjee Denni Tommasi
- 24 May, 2021
- Articles
How effective are unenforced mandates for corporate social responsibility?
By enacting the Companies Act in 2013, India became the first country in the world to mandate spending by large corporations on socially responsible initiatives. Using firm data from 2010 and 2016, th...
- Sangeeta Bansal Madhu Khanna
- 05 April, 2021
- Articles
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...
- I4I Team
- 29 January, 2021
- 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.
- Ashok Kotwal
- 24 December, 2020
- 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...
- Diane Coffey Payal Hathi Nazar Khalid Nidhi Khurana Amit Thorat
- 11 November, 2020
- 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...
- Suhas Jangle Bhargav Jangle
- 04 November, 2020
- 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...
- Sneha P
- 02 November, 2020
- 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...
- Parikshit Ghosh
- 27 October, 2020
- Perspectives
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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...
- Jean Drèze
- 03 August, 2018
- 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...
- Jean Drèze
- 10 March, 2022
- 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...
- Apurva Bamezai M.R. Sharan
- 12 September, 2018
- Perspectives