27 November, 2025Is Language a bridge or barrier? Linguistic distance and the health of women and children
India is a linguistically diverse country with a large flow of internal migrants. This article demonstrates that the greater the “linguistic distance” between a woman’s native language and the d...
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Advaith Jayakumar Anisha Sharma 
10 November, 2025
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Markets, marriage, and norms: Understanding female labour force participation in India
Despite recent gains in India’s female labour force participation rate due to rural self-employment, women’s work in the country remains constrained by factors on both the demand and supply side. ...
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Farzana Afridi
- 03 November, 2025
- Perspectives
How dowry shapes migration decisions in modern India
While migration is a critical driver of economic development, it may disrupt arrangements wherein parents rely on sons for old-age support. Leveraging new survey data, this article shows that at the t...
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Natalie Bau Gaurav Khanna Alessandra Voena
- 23 October, 2025
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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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Rohini Somanathan
- 22 February, 2017
- Perspectives
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...
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Shabana Mitra Kalle Moene
- 27 January, 2017
- 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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Urmila Chatterjee Rinku Murgai Martin Rama
- 13 January, 2017
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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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Rossella Calvi
- 19 September, 2016
- Articles
Courting women's votes: What does this mean for women?
In the recent state assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, political parties targeted women voters with specific handouts and proposed policies such as alcohol bans. This column contends that while the in...
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Sarah Khan
- 01 July, 2016
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Women and the Indian job market: Glass ceiling or sticky floor?
The gender wage gap among regular wage and salaried workers in India was 49% in 2009-10. This column finds the bulk of the gap is due to discrimination against women in the job market, rather than di...
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Ashwini Deshpande Deepti Goel Shantanu Khanna
- 10 June, 2016
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The right to shelter: An evaluation of the land transfer programme to Mahadalits in Bihar
This project follows the implementation of a land distribution scheme towards Mahadalit households in Bihar, the most oppressed of the Scheduled Castes in the state. It aims to describe which Mahadali...
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Hemanshu Kumar Rohini Somanathan
- 10 June, 2016
- IGC Research on India
Caste quotas in politics and development outcomes
To guarantee the political inclusion of the historically marginalised groups, electoral quotas have been in place for them in India since 1950. Analysing the constituency-level impact of quotas for S...
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Francesca R. Jensenius
- 14 April, 2016
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Maternal mortality and gender prejudice
While maternal mortality has fallen sharply in the last decade, it remains unnecessarily high at about 800 deaths a day worldwide. Moreover, there is enormous variation in levels and rates of decline ...
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Sonia Bhalotra Damian C. Clarke Joseph Flavian Gomes Atheendar Venkataramani
- 22 February, 2016
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How has land acquisition impacted dalits? A case study from Maharashtra
Land ownership in Indian villages is inextricably linked to caste, with dalits owing little or no land. Based on a survey in Maharashtra, this column assesses the impact of land acquisition and subse...
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Dhanmanjiri Sathe
- 17 December, 2015
- Articles
Missing unmarried women
The developing world has notoriously low sex ratios, a phenomenon that has been described as ‘missing women’. This is believed to be driven by parental preferences for sons, sex-selective abortion...
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Siwan Anderson Debraj Ray
- 19 October, 2015
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Role model effects? Women's political participation in India
Women’s political candidacy in India is very low and appears to be an important barrier to their representation in government. Does a deficiency of female role models hold back women’s candidacy?...
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Sonia Bhalotra Irma Clots-Figueras Lakshmi Iyer
- 14 September, 2015
- Articles
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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
- Articles
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