23 June, 2025Raising 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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Girls in tech: Evaluating IIT’s Supernumerary Seats Scheme
Introduced in 2018, the Supernumerary Seats Scheme seeks to improve gender ratios among undergraduate engineering students at IITs, which have historically been male dominated. This article shows that...
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Nandana Sengupta Swati Sharma
- 21 May, 2025
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What is behind the recent rise in women’s workforce participation?
Women’s workforce participation in India increased from 32% in 2022-23 to 37% in 2023-24, with the rise concentrated in rural areas. This article demonstrates that this significant change may be dri...
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Priyanshi Chaudhary Avanindra Nath Thakur
- 13 May, 2025
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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
- Articles
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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Wheels of power: Long-term effects of the Bihar Cycle Programme
The Bihar government introduced a programme in 2006 to give cash to grade 9 girls to buy bicycles to go to school. Based on a survey undertaken in 2016, this article shows that beneficiaries were more...
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Shabana Mitra Kalle Moene
- 04 March, 2019
- Articles
Learning to cooperate in a culture of honour
In many parts of the world, we observe persistent dysfunction in learning to cooperate around common interests. Cultural differences – ideas of what constitutes an insult and what an appropriate res...
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Karla Hoff
- 20 February, 2019
- Articles
Using mobile phones to measure discrimination
One aspect of human well-being that has often been overlooked in survey research on low- and middle-income countries is the extent to which prejudice and discrimination diminish social welfare. This a...
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Diane Coffey Payal Hathi Nazar Khalid Nidhi Khurana Amit Thorat
- 09 January, 2019
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The macroeconomic benefits of gender diversity
The persistent gap between female and male labour force participation comes at a significant economic cost. This article argues that because women and men complement each other in the production proce...
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Christine Lagarde Jonathan D. Ostry
- 04 January, 2019
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Do urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants? Evidence from a nationwide field experiment in India
In recent decades, the global south has witnessed an explosive increase in the number of people relocating from rural to urban areas. Yet many migrants struggle to integrate into destination cities, f...
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Nikhar Gaikwad Gareth Nellis
- 31 December, 2018
- IGC Research on India
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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
- Articles