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
- Articles
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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Property rights, household conflict and suicide in India
Suicide has become the second leading cause of death among young Indians. This column finds that improved inheritance rights for women are associated with an increase in the incidence of suicide amon...
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Siwan Anderson Garance Genicot
- 09 July, 2015
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Religion and health in early childhood: Evidence from South Asia
The widespread malnutrition of children in South Asia is persistent and troubling. Given the importance of religion in the region, this column examines the relationship between inequalities in child ...
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Elizabeth Brainerd Nidhiya Menon
- 03 July, 2015
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Women's empowerment and child malnutrition in rural India
Research has found mother’s empowerment to have a positive impact on the nutrition status of their children. This column analyses this relationship for data from rural India for the period 1992-200...
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Samuel Annim Raghav Gaiha Katsushi Imai Veena S. Kulkarni
- 19 June, 2015
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Women's economic empowerment and domestic violence
The safety of women in India – both inside and outside homes – is a major concern. This column explores the link between women’s economic empowerment, in the form of stronger inheritance rights...
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Aparna Mathur
- 13 March, 2015
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Impact of the two-child limit for local politicians
Some Indian states debar individuals with more than two children from contesting local elections. This column finds that while the law has significantly reduced fertility among the general population...
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S Anukriti Abhishek Chakravarty
- 02 March, 2015
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Enhancing women's participation in water governance
Women’s participation has become a key theme in water and sanitation projects. However, projects that have made provisions for women’s participation have yielded mixed results in terms of the qua...
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Priyam Das
- 25 February, 2015
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Women leaders and deceptive behaviour
Are women in leadership positions more dishonest than men? Based on an artefactual field experiment in rural Bihar, this column finds that women in leadership positions deceive more than men, especia...
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Lata Gangadharan Tarun Jain Pushkar Maitra Joseph Vecci
- 29 January, 2015
- Articles
Does affirmative action reduce productivity? The case of Indian Railways
Critics of job reservations argue that such policies have an adverse effect on work efficiency and productivity. This column analyses the effect of job reservations in the Indian Railways – the wor...
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Ashwini Deshpande Thomas Weisskopf
- 21 January, 2015
- Articles
Social Justice in Education: Are School Uniform and Scholarship Schemes Marred with Discrimination in Bihar?
This project evaluated on how well the attendance conditionality is being implemented in the schools of Bihar, and whether it’s marred with caste-based discrimination. The study found that the atte...
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Abhimanyu Gahlaut Chinmaya Kumar Pankaj Verma
- 31 December, 2014
- IGC Research on India
Keeping women safe
Since the December 2012 rape incident in Delhi, numerous policies have been proposed to stop the “war on women”. In this article, Rohini Pande discusses economic research, including her own, on t...
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Rohini Pande
- 24 December, 2014
- Perspectives
Do awareness programmes on TV help change prejudices?
Awareness-based TV programmes, such as Satya Mev Jayate hosted by Bollywood film personality Aamir Khan, aim to change deep-seated prejudices of the society. To what extent do such programmes influenc...
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Ritwik Banerjee Nabanita Datta Gupta
- 24 November, 2014
- Articles
How gender-inclusive is MNREGA in practice?
MNREGA mandates that a third of all workers under the programme should be women. But how gender inclusive has the implementation of the Act been? This column uses nationally representative data to an...
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Upasak Das
- 21 November, 2014
- Perspectives
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Social Identity Posts
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
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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...
- Guilhem Cassan Daniel Keniston Tatjana Kleineberg
- 18 November, 2022
- Articles
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