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Productivity & Innovation

India’s data workers: The human labour making machines learn

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Night shift bans and female employment in Indian manufacturing

Between 2014 and 2017, seven Indian states amended their regulations to allow women to work night shifts in factories, with the condition that employers provide female-friendly amenities. This article...

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Exit barriers as entry barriers: Explaining India’s odd development path

Despite an abundance of low-skilled labour, India never experienced the kind of take-off in labour-intensive manufacturing seen in other countries at similar income levels. This article argues that a ...

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Planning for ‘jobs of the future’ in a changing world

Following decades of structural transformation, in the coming years, external factors including climate change, increasing automation, and global economic policies will all play a role in determining ...

  • Perspectives
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Weaving through generations: Productivity gains in family-owned businesses in rural India

In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, weaving is often a family enterprise. Using data from over 1,800 households, this ongoing mixed-methods evaluation by Patel et al. shows that households with multi-gen...

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Insights from the rollout of LAKSHYAM – an integrated performance management system

In rural parts of India, Lekhpals or patwaris play an important role in upholding property rights by maintaining land records – however, there is no effective system to track their performance. In t...

  • Notes from the Field

DP-WEE Panel Discussion: Status and rights of platform and gig workers

A virtual panel discussion was organised by the Digital Platforms and Women’s Economic Empowerment (DP-WEE) programme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand the status and l...

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Supporting women weavers: Learnings from producer companies

The lack of market demand and low earnings, as well as competition from power looms, has led to declining participation of artisans in India's handloom industry. In this note, Dang et al. share some i...

  • Notes from the Field

Collecting labour market statistics to study the platform economy

Although India has emerged as a leader in digital labour market platforms, there is a dearth of data about the gig economy. Neha Arya describes the efforts taken by the CMIE to collect data on platfor...

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A review of women’s engagement with digital labour market platforms

Summarising some findings from ongoing work being done as part of the DP-WEE project, Sneha Ganguly highlights how the emergence of digital labour platforms have the potential to improve women's acces...

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How worker investments can fuel productivity in India’s manufacturing sector

In the second article in the Ideas@IPF2023 series, Adhvaryu et al. synthesise some facts on India’s declining manufacturing productivity and variations across states and industries. They examine exi...

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AI and services-led growth: Evidence from Indian job adverts

Using a new dataset of online vacancies from India’s largest jobs website, Copestake et al. document near-exponential growth in the demand for artificial intelligence-related skills in the services...

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Implicit costs of factor allocation for Indian firms

Looking at variations in factor misallocation across states, Chaurey et al. measure trends in factor adjustment costs incurred by firms between 1999 and 2014. They find that adjustment costs for labou...

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The gendered employment effects of mobile internet access in developing countries

In the third post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Goldberg and Chiplunkar look at 3G internet coverage in 14 countries, and find that access to mobile internet...

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Bringing skilling and productive employment closer to women

On International Women’s Day, Farzana Afridi considers a key issue in the creation of good jobs for women – the provision of skilling. She discusses the lack of physical and financial access to sk...

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Formalisation of informal manufacturing enterprises in India

Employment in India’s organised manufacturing sector has grown rapidly since 2004. This article finds that about 15% of this growth can be attributed to the formalisation of previously informal ente...

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Neha Arya

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

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Kanika Mahajan

Ashoka University

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Bhanu Gupta

Ashoka University

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Daksh Walia

University of Oxford

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Anisha Sharma

Ashoka University

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Kala Krishna

Pennsylvania State University

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Shoumitro Chatterjee

Johns Hopkins University

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Kalyani Padmakumar

Florida State University

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Most Popular Productivity & Innovation Posts

The impact of robotisation on the world economy: A forward-looking review

Robots have long existed in human imagination and only recently in the real world. The baggage of past imagination often intrudes into our understanding of how real robots will affect our economic liv...

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Tripura’s bamboo sector: Potential and challenges

About a third of the total area of Tripura is covered by bamboo, and bamboo has emerged as a key thrust area for the state’s industrial development. Based on a field visit that was undertaken to stu...

  • Notes from the Field

An offline alternative for Aadhaar-based biometric authentication

While decision on the constitutionality of Aadhaar by the Supreme Court of India remains a matter of speculation, it has become abundantly clear that most of the use cases for Aadhaar-based biometric ...

  • Perspectives