India’s Women’s Reservation Act: A big win for governance and beyond
Amidst debates about the recently passed women's reservation act and whether it will reduce gender disparities on the ground, Wattal and Gopalan summarise evidence from a number of randomised evaluati...
- Akshara Gopalan Urvashi Wattal
- 15 December, 2023
- Perspectives
The distributional consequences of political reservations
This article identifies and attempts to fill in the gaps in understanding the effects of reservations for Scheduled Castes (SCs) in Panchayats. Using data from a state-wide census, multiple administra...
- Chinmaya Kumar M.R. Sharan
- 28 November, 2023
- Articles
The complexity of female empowerment interventions
In the final post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Siwan Anderson unpacks the complex dimensions and interactions between measures of female empowerment. She hi...
- Siwan Anderson
- 30 March, 2023
- Perspectives
Empowering women through direct digital wage payments
India’s rate of female labour force participation dropped from 37% in 1990 to 28% in 2015. Can greater control over earned income incentivise women to work and influence gender norms? This article d...
- Erica Field Charity Troyer Moore Rohini Pande Natalia Rigol Simone Schaner
- 29 November, 2019
- Articles
Creating safe public spaces for women and alcohol consumption in bars
Bars provide on-premise alcohol consumption and serve as social drinking spaces. Kerala, in 2014, shut down all bars serving hard liquor in the state. This article examines the policy change and wheth...
- Saloni Khurana Kanika Mahajan
- 25 November, 2019
- Articles
Fifteen years of gender budgeting in India: A Retrospective
In this year’s Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that she will constitute a committee to evaluate 15 years of gender budgeting. It entails looking at the budget through the...
- Ashok Lahiri
- 29 October, 2019
- Videos
Coping with a policy shock in rural South India: Social networks as a determinant of trust
Trust and participation in social networks are inherently interrelated. This article identifies the determinants of trust in rural South India, where a mechanism of coping with shocks through transact...
- Anne Hilger Christophe Jalil Nordman
- 21 October, 2019
- Articles
Closing gender gaps in India: Does increasing women’s access to finance help?
Gender gaps in women’s economic opportunities – in the labour market and in entrepreneurship – have remained high in India. This article analyses the macroeconomic impact of closing gender gaps ...
- Purva Khera
- 16 August, 2019
- Articles
Inequality of opportunity among Indian women
Inequality of opportunity (IOp) in any society is that part of overall inequality which arises from factors beyond an individual’s control such as parental education, caste, gender, religion etc. Th...
- Akanksha Choudhary Gowtham Muthukkumaran Ashish Singh
- 05 August, 2019
- Articles
Prevalence and evolution of dowry in India
Dowry payments are an important part of household finances in India, typically exceeding a year of earnings. This article analyses data from an all-India sample of over 70,000 marriages to document fa...
- Gaurav Chiplunkar Jeffrey Weaver
- 24 June, 2019
- Articles
Traditional hierarchies and affirmative action in a globalising economy: Evidence from India
India has had a long-standing policy of affirmative action to address deep-rooted caste inequities and discrimination. This article compares successive age cohorts of three broad social groups – Sch...
- Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 21 June, 2019
- Articles
Women’s work and fertility: Evidence from 200 years, 103 countries
The declining rates of female labour force participation in developing countries in the last two decades have led researchers to focus on the role of fertility in women’s labour supply decisions. Us...
- Daniel Aaronson Rajeev Dehejia Andrew Jordan Cristian Pop-Eleches Cyrus Samii Karl Schulze
- 03 June, 2019
- Articles
Where are the Indian female politicians?
When women win elections, does it inspire other women to run for candidacy or does it convince men to close ranks before the next election?
- Lakshmi Iyer
- 24 May, 2019
- Podcasts
The road not taken: Gender gaps along paths to political power
Research and policy efforts towards greater female political participation have largely focused on women’s voting behaviour, and their representation as elected public officials. However, there are ...
- Lakshmi Iyer Anandi Mani
- 21 May, 2019
- Articles
The 10% quota: Is caste no longer an indicator of backwardness?
The Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill 2019 seeks to provide for the advancement of “economically weaker sections”, through 10% reservation in government jobs and higher educational institutions ...
- Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 17 May, 2019
- Articles
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Social Identity Posts
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
- 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...
- Swati Narayan
- 03 April, 2019
- Articles
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
- Articles