05 March, 2025The wide-ranging benefits of India’s Public Distribution System
India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) is the world’s largest food transfer programme and India’s most far-reaching social safety net, accounting for 60% of the country’s social assistance b...
-
Kathy Baylis Ben Crost Aditya Shrinivas 
17 February, 2025
- Articles
Network membership and demand for health insurance
Despite being free and having liberal eligibility criteria, the adoption of public health insurance in India remains low. This article examines how informal networks influence adoption behaviour, in t...
-
Titir Bhattacharya Tanika Chakraborty Anirban Mukherjee
- 17 January, 2025
- Articles
Powering progress: How reliable community electrification boosts women’s autonomy
While there has been significant progress in expanding access to grid electricity in India, the reliability of electricity remains a concern. Based on five national-level datasets spanning over a peri...
-
Rikhia Bhukta Debayan Pakrashi Sarani Saha Ashish Sedai
- 06 January, 2025
- Articles
Sweet cash: Women’s demand for healthcare in developing countries
Agrawal et al. explore the role of gender-based preferences for demand of healthcare. Using CPHS data they find that the positive income shock – generated by a change in the mandated rates of contri...
-
Shubhangi Agrawal Chirantan Chatterjee Somdeep Chatterjee
- 27 April, 2023
- Articles
Empowering patients with information to improve hospital accountability
Despite the expansion of free healthcare for the poor throughout India, many hospitals continue to charge patients out-of-pocket fees. In this study, Dupas and Jain investigate whether informing patie...
-
Pascaline Dupas Radhika Jain
- 24 April, 2023
- Articles
The unintended positive consequences of India’s safe motherhood programme
India’s flagship maternal health intervention, Janani Suraksha Yojana, provided conditional cash transfers to women opting for institutional deliveries. In this study, Chatterjee and Poddar document...
-
Somdeep Chatterjee Prashant Poddar
- 11 April, 2023
- Articles
Low-tech and teacher support interventions during school closures
School closures during Covid-19 significantly impacted early childhood education, especially in households without sufficient parental engagement. Using data from households affiliated with Balwadis a...
-
Pooja Pandey Avinash Reddy Pichhili Aditya Narayan Rai Karan Singhal Nisha Pankaj Vernekar
- 03 April, 2023
- Articles
A data story on female child marriage in India
In the eighth post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Shubham Mudgil and Swathi Rao from The Quantum Hub use a novel dataset based on NFHS-5 to present data highl...
-
Shubham Mudgil Swathi Ramesh Rao
- 20 March, 2023
- Perspectives
Time poverty for girls: Implications for educational attainment and workforce participation
In the fifth post of I4I’s month-long campaign to mark International Women’s Day 2023, Priyadarshini et al. leverage time use data from a study in Bihar, and find that girls take on a majority of ...
-
Shubha Bhattacharya Wendy Cheung Madhu Joshi Anamika Priyadarshini
- 14 March, 2023
- Articles
Understanding intergenerational educational mobility with conflicting evidence
There is a growing literature on intergenerational educational mobility that explores how parental education influences the educational attainment of children. This article compares three empirical mo...
-
Md Nazmul Ahsan M. Shahe Emran Hanchen Jiang Orla Murphy Forhad Shilpi
- 03 March, 2023
- Articles
Is open defecation still prevalent in rural north India?
In an attempt to understand open defecation in four focus states in the aftermath of the Swachh Bharat Mission, Vyas and Gupta evaluate the findings of the NFHS-5. They note that the NFHS is likely to...
-
Aashish Gupta Sangita Vyas
- 20 January, 2023
- Articles
Phone-based assessment data: Triangulating schools’ learning outcomes
Recent research has shown that schools often report overestimated learning outcomes, as they fear adverse consequences if they report poor performance. In this post, Gupta et al. describe a pilot stud...
-
Rahul Ahluwalia Vaani Chopra Niharika Gupta Saloni Gupta Azeem Panjwani Kumar Satyam Prakhar Singh
- 11 January, 2023
- Articles
Credit cooperatives: Promoting worker well-being during crises?
Research shows that access to alternative credit mechanisms during the pandemic enabled informal women workers to gain financial security, benefitting their mental well-being in the process. Based on ...
-
Devika Oberai
- 06 January, 2023
- Perspectives
India’s early years mathematics curriculum: Continuity, discontinuity and progression
Research has shown the importance of building strong foundations for learning, as the development of cognitive skills in preschool and early primary years is predictive of later mathematical achieveme...
-
Benjamin Alcott Suman Bhattacharjea Caroline Dyer Aashna Khurana Purnima Ramanujan
- 02 January, 2023
- Articles
Challenges in access to secondary education in India
India’s latest National Education Policy has envisaged universal access to education by 2030. However, while enrolment is high in elementary schools, access to and uptake of secondary education has ...
-
Mridusmita Bordoloi Sharad Pandey
- 09 November, 2022
- Perspectives
Twitter feed
Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Human Development Posts
Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials in India: District-level estimates from Census 2011
The 2011 Indian Census data show a higher growth rate of Muslim population compared to the Hindu population. This article provides an in-depth picture of Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials at the di...
- Saswata Ghosh
- 27 March, 2019
- Articles
Understanding India’s mental health crisis
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, several reports have indicated a worsening of mental health issues among individuals across age groups. In this post, Michele Mary Bernadine examines the stat...
- Michele Mary Bernadine
- 06 April, 2021
- Perspectives
Ten steps to transform the quality of education in India
In this article, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director of Educational Initiatives, suggests 10 initiatives that can help transform the quality of education in India.
- Sridhar Rajagopalan
- 19 November, 2015
- Perspectives