•  
Main Banner Image
Social Identity

Female labour force participation: Measurement and data quality

  • Articles

International Women’s Day 2025: Towards equality and empowerment

Throughout this week, I4I has been sharing some of the latest evidence and ideas around women’s empowerment to mark International Women’s Day 2025. Discover the five-part series, and more about I4...

  • Symposium

Defensive cooperation: Understanding pro-social attitudes in Indian Muslims

Mainstream theories of development predict greater willingness to contribute to public goods in more homogeneous settings. This article reports findings from a study in Delhi slums to assess how Hindu...

  • Articles

Affirmative action in credit markets: Can it enhance minorities’ welfare?

In 2009, as part of a Government of India programme to improve the welfare of religious minorities, commercial banks were directed to increase credit to these groups. This article finds that the polic...

  • Articles
228 posts
Refine list by:
--Please Select--
--Please Select--

Inter-gender and intra-gender gaps in land ownership in India

While women’s landownership is recognised as a key indicator of their economic empowerment, there are no detailed estimates of how many and which women own land in India. Analysing longitudinal data...

  • Articles

Do promises work? Assessing long-term benefits of ‘Apni Beti Apna Dhan’ programme

During 1994-1998, the state government of Haryana ran a conditional cash transfer programme to address the issue of child marriage: at the time of a daughter’s birth, parents from marginalised secti...

  • Articles

Is OBC reservation good for development?

The affirmative action debate has always been riddled by the question of merit versus social justice, and discussions around having a caste census have once again reignited the controversy around rese...

  • Articles

Does access liberalise gender norms around phone use for rural women?

Despite improved connectivity, deep-rooted gender norms continue to shape access to and use of mobile technologies by women in India. This note discusses preliminary findings from a study, which sugge...

  • Notes from the Field

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...

  • Articles

Do quotas in public sector employment for disadvantaged groups enhance their welfare?

Affirmative action policies remain controversial with many arguing that benefits come at the expense of those excluded, and accrue disproportionately to the elite in disadvantaged groups. Analysing na...

  • Articles

Is it safe? Threat of sexual violence and women’s decision to work

Despite significant improvements in women's educational attainment and reduced fertility rates, India’s female labour force participation (FLFP) remains among the lowest globally. Using nationally r...

  • Articles

Countering violence against women with awareness creation and self-defence training

The 2019 National Crime Records Bureau report shows a 7.3% increase, compared to 2018, in violence against women, with one in three women being subject to physical, emotional, or sexual violence. In t...

  • Perspectives

The escalating financial burden of child births

Data from the 2019-20 National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 show that in several states, the proportion of institutional deliveries remain below the national average, with high out-of-pocket expendit...

  • Perspectives

Evolution of dowry in rural India: Evidence from 1960-2008

Despite being illegal since 1961, dowry continues to be a widespread phenomenon in rural India. In the first of a two-part series, this article tracks the evolution of dowry during 1960-2008 across st...

  • Articles

How dowry influences household decisions in rural India

It is widely believed that Indian parents start saving for dowry as soon as a daughter is born. In the second of a two-part series on dowry in rural India, this article examines how dowry influences h...

  • Articles

India’s ‘missing girls’: Women’s education and declining child sex-ratios

Although women’s education has been proposed as a solution to the persistent issue of ‘missing girls’ in India, studies have reached contradictory conclusions on the impact of female education o...

  • Articles

Recent Contributors

Karan

Karan Bhasin

University at Albany, SUNY

Surjit

Surjit Bhalla

International Monetary Fund

Tirthatanmoy

Tirthatanmoy Das

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

I4I

I4I Team

Ideas for India

Kanika

Kanika Mahajan

Ashoka University

Zahra

Zahra Siddique

University of Bristol

Sugat

Sugat Chaturvedi

Ahmedabad University

Nishant

Nishant .

Independent researcher

View all Contributors

Most 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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles

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...

  • Articles