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Female labour force participation: Measurement and data quality

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Cash transfers to end child marriage: The Indian experience

For over two decades, policymakers in India have been experimenting with conditional cash transfers to address the issue of child marriage. In this article, Amin et al. contend that financial incenti...

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Holy wars: Temple desecrations in medieval India

The rise of extremist groups such as the Taliban and the Islamic State, and their destruction of religious relics, have led some to magnify the presence of religious bigotry in Islamic societies. Usi...

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Getting India's women into the workforce: Time for a smart approach

In this article, Rohini Pande, the Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, contends that raising India’s stubbornly low rate of female labour force participation will r...

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Women and work in Asia: Insights for India's low female labour force participation

In this article, Sher Singh Verick, Deputy Director, ILO’s Decent Work Team for South Asia and Country Office for India, shows how India compares with other countries in Asia as well as with other ...

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Declining female labour force participation in rural India: The demand side

National Sample Survey data shows a decline in rural women’s workforce participation between 2004-05 and 2011-12. Rising rural incomes and women’s education over the same period have been taken a...

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Declining female labour force participation in rural India: The supply side

Analysis of National Sample Survey data shows that low rates of female labour force participation in India are concentrated among married women in rural areas. This column suggests that this is partl...

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Introduction to e-Symposium: Women and work in India

Female labour force participation in India has been low and stagnant over the past few decades. I4I Editor Farzana Afridi is hosting an e-symposium to examine research that explores the reasons for t...

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What explains the low and stagnating female labour force participation in India?

In this article, Stephan Klasen gives an overview of the existing evidence on the supply- and demand-side drivers of female labour force participation in India.

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The battle for backwardness

Ahead of the assembly elections in Punjab, the state government granted ‘Other Backward Classes’ status to Rajput Sikhs. In this article, Rohini Somanathan contends that caste reservations first ...

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Women's empowerment and changing social norms: Persistent effects of a one-time targeted in-kind transfer in India

The project explored how a targeted social reform - the “Cycle program” in Bihar - affected the aspirations and behaviour of young women. The Cycle program was successful in increasing enrolment i...

  • IGC Research on India

What explains the decline in female labour force participation in India?

It is often argued that female labour force participation is declining in India due to rising incomes that allow more women to stay at home, which is the preferred household choice in a predominantly...

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Why are older women missing in India? The age profile of bargaining power and poverty

The ratio of women to men is particularly low in India relative to developed countries. It has recently been argued that close to half of these ‘missing’ women are of post-reproductive ages. What...

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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...

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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...

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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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