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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Women and the Indian job market: Glass ceiling or sticky floor?
The gender wage gap among regular wage and salaried workers in India was 49% in 2009-10. This column finds the bulk of the gap is due to discrimination against women in the job market, rather than di...
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Ashwini Deshpande Deepti Goel Shantanu Khanna
- 10 June, 2016
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The right to shelter: An evaluation of the land transfer programme to Mahadalits in Bihar
This project follows the implementation of a land distribution scheme towards Mahadalit households in Bihar, the most oppressed of the Scheduled Castes in the state. It aims to describe which Mahadali...
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Hemanshu Kumar Rohini Somanathan
- 10 June, 2016
- IGC Research on India
Caste quotas in politics and development outcomes
To guarantee the political inclusion of the historically marginalised groups, electoral quotas have been in place for them in India since 1950. Analysing the constituency-level impact of quotas for S...
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Francesca R. Jensenius
- 14 April, 2016
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Maternal mortality and gender prejudice
While maternal mortality has fallen sharply in the last decade, it remains unnecessarily high at about 800 deaths a day worldwide. Moreover, there is enormous variation in levels and rates of decline ...
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Sonia Bhalotra Damian C. Clarke Joseph Flavian Gomes Atheendar Venkataramani
- 22 February, 2016
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How has land acquisition impacted dalits? A case study from Maharashtra
Land ownership in Indian villages is inextricably linked to caste, with dalits owing little or no land. Based on a survey in Maharashtra, this column assesses the impact of land acquisition and subse...
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Dhanmanjiri Sathe
- 17 December, 2015
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Missing unmarried women
The developing world has notoriously low sex ratios, a phenomenon that has been described as ‘missing women’. This is believed to be driven by parental preferences for sons, sex-selective abortion...
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Siwan Anderson Debraj Ray
- 19 October, 2015
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Role model effects? Women's political participation in India
Women’s political candidacy in India is very low and appears to be an important barrier to their representation in government. Does a deficiency of female role models hold back women’s candidacy?...
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Sonia Bhalotra Irma Clots-Figueras Lakshmi Iyer
- 14 September, 2015
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Property rights, household conflict and suicide in India
Suicide has become the second leading cause of death among young Indians. This column finds that improved inheritance rights for women are associated with an increase in the incidence of suicide amon...
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Siwan Anderson Garance Genicot
- 09 July, 2015
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Religion and health in early childhood: Evidence from South Asia
The widespread malnutrition of children in South Asia is persistent and troubling. Given the importance of religion in the region, this column examines the relationship between inequalities in child ...
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Elizabeth Brainerd Nidhiya Menon
- 03 July, 2015
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Women's empowerment and child malnutrition in rural India
Research has found mother’s empowerment to have a positive impact on the nutrition status of their children. This column analyses this relationship for data from rural India for the period 1992-200...
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Samuel Annim Raghav Gaiha Katsushi Imai Veena S. Kulkarni
- 19 June, 2015
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Women's economic empowerment and domestic violence
The safety of women in India – both inside and outside homes – is a major concern. This column explores the link between women’s economic empowerment, in the form of stronger inheritance rights...
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Aparna Mathur
- 13 March, 2015
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Impact of the two-child limit for local politicians
Some Indian states debar individuals with more than two children from contesting local elections. This column finds that while the law has significantly reduced fertility among the general population...
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S Anukriti Abhishek Chakravarty
- 02 March, 2015
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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
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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
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