29 September, 2025Protecting girls at school: How sanitation infrastructure can reduce sexual violence
Over 30% of reported rape cases in India involve victims under 18, with girls particularly at risk. One key factor that exposes females to harm is the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. This arti...
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Pei Gao Aditi Kothari Yu-Hsiang Lei 
29 July, 2025
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How MNREGA reduced women’s labour force participation
By guaranteeing 100 workdays annually per household in rural India, MNREGA seeks to enhance economic security and alleviate poverty. This article shows that while the programme has successfully achiev...
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Jorge Luis García
- 18 July, 2025
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Raising the value of women’s time for a transition to clean fuels
A majority of women in rural India continue to use traditional fuels, adding to the time that they devote to domestic work. In this post, Farzana Afridi discusses findings from a survey in Madhya Prad...
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Farzana Afridi
- 04 June, 2025
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Traditional hierarchies and affirmative action in a globalising economy: Evidence from India
India has had a long-standing policy of affirmative action to address deep-rooted caste inequities and discrimination. This article compares successive age cohorts of three broad social groups – Sch...
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Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 21 June, 2019
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Women’s work and fertility: Evidence from 200 years, 103 countries
The declining rates of female labour force participation in developing countries in the last two decades have led researchers to focus on the role of fertility in women’s labour supply decisions. Us...
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Daniel Aaronson Rajeev Dehejia Andrew Jordan Cristian Pop-Eleches Cyrus Samii Karl Schulze
- 03 June, 2019
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Where are the Indian female politicians?
When women win elections, does it inspire other women to run for candidacy or does it convince men to close ranks before the next election?
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Lakshmi Iyer
- 24 May, 2019
- Podcasts
The road not taken: Gender gaps along paths to political power
Research and policy efforts towards greater female political participation have largely focused on women’s voting behaviour, and their representation as elected public officials. However, there are ...
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Lakshmi Iyer Anandi Mani
- 21 May, 2019
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The 10% quota: Is caste no longer an indicator of backwardness?
The Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill 2019 seeks to provide for the advancement of “economically weaker sections”, through 10% reservation in government jobs and higher educational institutions ...
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Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 17 May, 2019
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A family affair: Family members’ role in female employment decisions in India
A factor behind low female labour force participation in India is family members’ objection to women working. Based on an experiment in Karnataka, this article assesses whether employers can use lig...
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Joshua Dean Seema Jayachandran
- 13 May, 2019
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Sparking the #MeToo revolution in India: Delhi's 'Nirbhaya' case
In 2012, anger erupted on the streets of Delhi following the violent rape and murder of a young woman. This article estimates the impact of the incident on the reporting of crimes against women in Del...
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Akshay Bhatnagar Aparna Mathur Abdul Munasib Devesh Roy
- 29 April, 2019
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The persistent gender gap in political participation in India
Women as citizens show up and speak up less in political spaces than men across the globe, particularly in lower- and middle-income countries. This article studies the persistent gender gap in politic...
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Soledad Prillaman
- 15 April, 2019
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Sex ratios and religion in India and South Asia
In South Asia, low child sex ratios are increasingly an isolated Indian phenomenon. Within India, child sex ratios are ‘normal’ among Christians and Muslims but much lower among Hindus, Sikhs, and...
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Swati Narayan
- 03 April, 2019
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Ancestral ecological endowments and contemporary sex ratios
About six million women are ‘missing’ each year from the world, of which 2 million are from India alone. This article finds that there are proportionately more missing women in regions with poorer...
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Gautam Hazarika Chandan Kumar Jha Sudipta Sarangi
- 15 March, 2019
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The anomaly of women’s work and education in India
There has been a decline in the female labour force participation rate and size of the female labour force in India in recent years. This article looks at this trend in conjunction with female educati...
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Surbhi Ghai
- 07 March, 2019
- Articles
Does a fear of violence affect female labour supply in India?
Working-age women in developing-country labour markets might be particularly sensitive to media reports on sudden incidents of violence against women, which can deter them from going out to work. Usin...
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Zahra Siddique
- 06 March, 2019
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Social Identity Posts
Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials in India: An update
Building on past research, Saswata Ghosh and Pallabi Das estimate the state- and district-level fertility differentials between Hindus and Muslims using data from the latest round of the NFHS. They sh...
- Pallabi Das Saswata Ghosh
- 18 April, 2023
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A division of labourers: Caste identity and efficiency in India
Castes in India are closely associated with certain occupations and determine the jobs done by millions. This study uses a new dataset to show that a large proportion of workers still work in their ca...
- Guilhem Cassan Daniel Keniston Tatjana Kleineberg
- 18 November, 2022
- Articles
Measuring caste inequality across Indian states
Although recent research on inequality shows that upper castes have the highest levels of material well-being, there is a wide variation in caste inequality across India. Measuring three forms of cast...
- Poulomi Chakrabarti
- 13 September, 2021
- Articles