Overcoming socio-cultural resistance towards biogas technology
Cultural taboos are often described as an insurmountable barrier to adoption of domestic toilet-linked anaerobic digesters (TLADs). This study provides a better understanding of the socio-cultural resistance towards TLADs through findings from interviews with households in Assam, and demonstrates th...
- Articles
Content Type: Articles
Topic: Human Development
Year: 2023
How class and caste influence school choice
Families' socioeconomic status impacts how parents make decisions regarding their children's education. Taking into account the interplay of caste and class, this paper finds that when families are too rich or too poor their caste identity does not affect their decisions about school choice. However...
- Articles
Content Type: Articles
Topic: Social Identity
Year: 2023
Climate change and riverine pollution: The need for high-quality environment data in India
Controlling water pollution and protecting water resources in India requires comprehensive collection and monitoring of data. In this article, Pohit and Mehta describe a project undertaken by NCAER and TCD, which used automated sensors attached to boats to collect data on water quality parameters at...
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Anupma Mehta Sanjib Pohit 
28 June, 2023
- Perspectives
Content Type: Perspectives
Topic: Environment
Year: 2023
School absences as an early warning system
When children are frequently absent from school, it could be a sign that they are going through adverse personal circumstances. In this note, Anurag Kundu discusses the experience of launching a large-scale intervention to track students' attendance and provide support to vulnerable students that wo...
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Anurag Kundu
- 27 June, 2023
- Notes from the Field
Content Type: Notes from the Field
Topic: Human Development
Year: 2023
Women empowerment in India: Does colonial history matter?
Examining whether colonial history matters for women’s contemporary economic outcomes in India, this article shows that women who live in areas that were under direct British rule are better off in terms of almost all measures of women empowerment. It argues that legal and institutional changes br...
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Bharti Nandwani Punarjit Roychowdhury
- 22 June, 2023
- Articles
Content Type: Articles
Topic: Human Development
Year: 2023
Finding the indiscernible poor: Community knowledge as a targeting approach
Varying estimates of poverty have often resulted in some deprived communities being excluded from government welfare schemes. Sabarwal and Chowdhry look at the case of Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana in Bihar, which uses the mechanisms recommended by BRAC’s Graduation Approach and harnesses community k...
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Parikrama Chowdhry Shagun Sabarwal
- 19 June, 2023
- Perspectives
Content Type: Perspectives
Topic: Poverty & Inequality
Year: 2023
Economic integration and the transmission of democracy
Dramatic increases in globalisation resulted in autocratic countries being exposed to the institutions and values of their democratic trade partners. Exploiting improvements in air transportation relative to sea shipping that occurred over the last five decades, and combining survey data with countr...
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Giacomo Magistretti Marco Tabellini
- 15 June, 2023
- Articles
Content Type: Articles
Topic: Trade
Year: 2023
The impact of climate change on Indian crops
This article looks at deviations in the impact of short-term weather events and long-term climate change on yields of rice, maize and wheat, and finds that the negative impact of temperature is higher in the short run than in the long run, implying that farmers were able to adapt to long-term change...
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Madhu Khanna Surender Kumar
- 13 June, 2023
- Articles
Content Type: Articles
Topic: Agriculture
Year: 2023
How movies impact stigma and choice: Evidence from the pharmaceutical industry
Recently educational entertainment is emerging as a platform for addressing public health issues. In this article, Aggarwal, Chakrabarti, and Chatterjee investigate whether movies can destigmatise accessing healthcare and increase consumer choice in the Indian pharmaceutical market. They explore the...
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Anindya Chakrabarti Chirantan Chatterjee Mayank Aggarwal
- 07 June, 2023
- Articles
Content Type: Articles
Topic: Miscellany
Year: 2023
Keeping development at the forefront of India’s long-term climate strategy
India’s Long Term Low Emissions Development Strategy (LT-LEDS) sets out multiple low-carbon transitions, highlighting that climate action will be intimately tied to developmental processes. In this article, Chandra et al. identify some of the challenges and opportunities embedded within these tran...
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Aman Srivastava Mandakini Chandra Navroz K. Dubash Parth Bhatia
- 05 June, 2023
- Perspectives
Content Type: Perspectives
Topic: Environment
Year: 2023
Institutionalising social audits: Lessons from Meghalaya
Sidharth Santhosh summarises key findings from Meghalaya's experience of mandating social auditing for welfare schemes, including the need for stronger coalitions between citizens and the state, and greater autonomy of the institutions conducting oversight. These findings are complemented by the exp...
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Sidharth Santhosh
- 01 June, 2023
- Notes from the Field
Content Type: Notes from the Field
Topic: Governance
Year: 2023
Unpacking how MSMEs are defined in India’s manufacturing and services sector
The Indian government announced a number of reforms to help micro, small and medium enterprises that had been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic – including changes in how an MSMEs are classified. Rahul Ranjan looks at the shifting classification of enterprises between the old and new definitions a...
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Rahul Ranjan
- 30 May, 2023
- Perspectives
Content Type: Perspectives
Topic: Governance
Year: 2023