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Tag Search: “cash transfers”

Empowering daughters: How conditional cash transfers can shift cultural norms

During the last 30 years, Indian governments have implemented over 20 programmes that reward parents who have daughters and invest in them after birth. Yet, very little is known about these programmes...

  • Articles

In-kind transfers: Deadweight losses or gains?

Do in-kind transfers for social assistance lead to ‘deadweight losses’ by restricting consumer choice? This article presents findings from an experiment in Maharashtra, which involved offering low-inc...

  • Articles

Pandemic as a lens: Identifying and addressing livelihood vulnerabilities

Based on the findings from a phone survey of around 5,000 Indian workers, the authors explore the impact of the Covid-19 economic lockdown on two forms of livelihood vulnerabilities: employment insecu...

  • Notes from the Field

The pandemic and the package

The government has announced a package of fiscal and monetary policy actions, and broader economic reforms to set the economy back on track after the Covid-19 lockdown. In this post, Sengupta and Vard...

  • Articles

Webinar video: The new Coronavirus and the Indian economy

The global pandemic has created a terrible trade-off for every country between an economic crisis caused by a shutdown of the economic activity and a health crisis and fatalities as the healthcare sys...

  • Videos

India’s Covid-19 lockdown: An interim report

In an earlier paper, Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian had argued that in developing countries like India, a perspective of "lives versus lives" may be needed to evaluate the virtues of a stringent lockdo...

  • Perspectives

Covid-19 relief: Are women Jan Dhan accounts the right choice for cash transfers?

While the relief package announced by the Government of India for Covid-19 rightly complements food rations with cash transfers, the case for using the list of women Jan Dhan bank accounts for the lat...

  • Perspectives

How costly are flawed government responses to Covid-19? An assessment of the migrant crisis

By March-end, countless migrant workers started fleeing India’s locked-up cities and trekking home to their villages amidst the Covid-19 crisis. Sarmistha Pal argues that government’s responses until ...

  • Perspectives

Covid-19 and MSMEs: The ‘identification’ problem

A recent survey of 5,000 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) found that 71% of them could not pay salaries to their workers in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 lockdown in India. The government...

  • Perspectives

We need a Marshall Plan to fight Covid-19

There are still a lot of unknowns in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, but two robust lessons are clear: we need to pull out all stops to strengthen our healthcare capacity and reinforce social...

  • Perspectives

Covid-19: What can be done immediately to help vulnerable population

With over 80% of India’s workforce employed in the informal sector and one-third working as casual labour, Covid-19's spread and subsequent unplanned lockdowns, have created economic havoc in the live...

  • Perspectives

Economic Survey 2019-20: How does it seek to address challenges of farm sector?

This year’s Economic Survey, the flagship document of the Ministry of Finance, was recently tabled in the Parliament at a time of economic slowdown and rural distress in India. In this post, Sudha Nar...

  • Perspectives