30 April, 2025Policy Roundup: State budgets, time use survey, natural calamities
This post presents our monthly curation of developments in the policy landscape – highlighting I4I content pertaining to state budgets, gender gaps in time use, and mitigating the impact of natural ...
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Nalini Gulati 
01 April, 2025
- Perspectives
The man who loved forests
On Ideas for India’s 10th anniversary, our Editor-in-Chief Parikshit Ghosh pens a tribute honouring the late Ashok Kotwal, whose vision and values percolated our portal’s character to make it a ve...
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Parikshit Ghosh
- 19 July, 2022
- Editors Corner
On the perils of embedded experiments
There is growing interest in ‘embedded experiments’, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they se...
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Jean Drèze
- 10 March, 2022
- Perspectives
T.N., fondly remembered
Prof. T.N. Srinivasan, an acclaimed Indian economist and Professor Emeritus at Yale University, passed away on 11 November in Chennai. In this post, Prof. Rohini Somanathan of the Delhi School of Econ...
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Rohini Somanathan
- 19 November, 2018
- Perspectives
The particulars of social policy in India: Evidence, State capacity, and policy design
Economist-activist Jean Drèze has argued that economists are no better equipped to comment on development policy design than other social science researchers and other stakeholders, and that policyma...
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Apurva Bamezai M.R. Sharan
- 12 September, 2018
- Perspectives
Evidence, policy, and politics
Commenting on the concept of evidence-based policy, Jean Drèze argues that the relation between evidence and policy needs further thought. Based on his involvement with social policy in India, he bel...
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Jean Drèze
- 03 August, 2018
- Perspectives
Research, for whom?
In this note, Dr Abhay Bang discusses the importance of research in development. Giving examples from his 30 years of experience of working in the social sector, he contends that the power of knowledg...
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Abhay Bang
- 27 July, 2018
- Notes from the Field
On research in development economics
In an interview with a student at Fudan University, China, Dilip Mookherjee (Member of the I4I Editorial Board) discusses Chinese growth; India-China comparison; and research in development economics.
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Dilip Mookherjee
- 06 July, 2018
- Perspectives
Research gaps and policy priorities: Evidence from Bihar
The gap between research and policy priorities has always presented an enormous challenge both for academics and policymakers. With a scarcity of rigorous evidence in certain areas, this gap is partic...
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Kumar Das
- 09 May, 2018
- IGC Research on India
Ashok Kotwal speaks with Jean Drèze
I4I Editor-in-Chief Ashok Kotwal speaks with Jean Drèze, visiting Professor at Ranchi University and an ‘economist-activist’ who has been working in India at the grassroots level for a long time...
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Jean Drèze Ashok Kotwal
- 28 March, 2018
- Notes from the Field
Understanding cultural persistence and change
When does culture persist and when does it change? This column examines a determinant that has been put forth in the anthropology literature: the variability of the environment from one generation to...
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Paola Giuliano Nathan Nunn
- 07 March, 2018
- Articles
Economics among the road scholars
Jholawala Economics’ is a derogatory term that the urban elites use to dismiss the arguments of social activists without having to contend with them. However, some of the jholawalas are indeed first...
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Jean Drèze
- 22 December, 2017
- Perspectives
Fundamental errors in the voting booth margins
Psychologists have long documented that we over-attribute people's actions to innate characteristics rather than to circumstances. This column shows that when we commit this ‘fundamental attribution...
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Edward Glaeser Giacomo Ponzetto
- 17 November, 2017
- Articles
Introducing a new feature: – ‘Explainers’
Our day-to-day lives are tossed around due to economic changes, resulting sometimes from government policies and sometimes by unidentifiable forces of the world economy. Governments always label every...
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Ashok Kotwal
- 16 October, 2017
- Perspectives
Humanising economics
In a tribute to Richard Thaler, recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, Ashok Kotwal and Nalini Gulati discuss his pioneering work on decision-making that lies in the space between econom...
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Nalini Gulati Ashok Kotwal
- 10 October, 2017
- Perspectives
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Miscellany Posts
Evidence, policy, and politics
Commenting on the concept of evidence-based policy, Jean Drèze argues that the relation between evidence and policy needs further thought. Based on his involvement with social policy in India, he bel...
- Jean Drèze
- 03 August, 2018
- Perspectives
On the perils of embedded experiments
There is growing interest in ‘embedded experiments’, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they se...
- Jean Drèze
- 10 March, 2022
- Perspectives
The particulars of social policy in India: Evidence, State capacity, and policy design
Economist-activist Jean Drèze has argued that economists are no better equipped to comment on development policy design than other social science researchers and other stakeholders, and that policyma...
- Apurva Bamezai M.R. Sharan
- 12 September, 2018
- Perspectives