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• Examines women's use of courts to claim their shares in ancestral property, as promised by India's 2005 Hindu inheritance law. • Probes High Court judgements over 2005–2020 across regions, using online databases. • Identifies opposing parties, type of property disputed, regional variations in cases, time taken for case disposal. • Analyses case outcomes, source of property granted, and gender bias in language of judgements. • 77% of rulings grant women some property, but only half of these grant their direct share in coparcenary Joint Family Property. Recent decades have seen progressive reform of inheritance laws towards gender equality, both globally and in South Asia. Yet, a wide gender gap persists in actual ownership due to family resistance to endowing daughters with property. Given this, do women use courts to claim their rights across regions? Who are the opposing parties? What kind of property is most disputed? How long do cases take? To what extent do judgements favour women, and does the language of judgements reveal gender stereotypes? No prior study has addressed these questions. This paper does so for India. Here, under the Hindu Succession Amendment Act of 2005 (HSAA 2005), Hindu women achieved legal equality in inheritance rights over all property, including agricultural land and coparcenary joint family property (JFP) in which they now have direct shares by birth. To analyse women's use of courts to claim their coparcenary shares, we draw on the four main online data sources to extract 505 cases (from over 2900 examined) relating to women coparceners, where judgements were delivered in High Courts over 2005–2020. Brothers were the most commonly listed opponents to women's claims and most of the disputes related to land, especially agricultural. In 77% of the cases filed by women or against them, the rulings granted women some share in parental property. But only in 52% of these positive rulings did they receive their direct shares in JFP, while receiving property through other rights in the rest. The legal route thus holds some promise of positive outcomes, but progress specifically in the implementation of the HSAA 2005 remains limited. This will require activating new channels of support for women. Located in the interface of social science and law, this paper would also have relevance for other countries, both methodologically and in substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The paper shows how spirituality strategically supports an Adivasi self-empowerment movement in India. • Spirituality provides motivation, makes groups' indigeneity visible, and protects their activities against reprisals. • Tribal groups in India using this strategy can escape debt bondage and gain their own land. • Action organisations working with subaltern groups can orchestrate spirituality to achieve progressive goals. Spirituality strategically enables self-empowerment in a clandestine movement of Adivasis which this paper calls 'the Programme'. To explain how social movements and action organisations can orchestrate spirituality, this paper examines how the Programme helps landless rural people overcome debt bondage and gain land by employing spiritual repertoires. The paper addresses the question how, in the context of an increasingly tribalised politics in India, spiritual orchestration allows some Scheduled Tribes to make substantive economic gains, especially on debt freedom and land rights. The paper draws on an analysis of qualitative data collected through workshops, interviews and visits to villages across several Indian states, which has been anonymised to protect identities and avoid divulging sensitive information. The study finds that spirituality supports self-empowerment in three ways: first, it provides motivation and ideological reinforcement for people engaging in struggles against debt bondage and for land rights; second, it makes tribal identity more visible and helps groups make claims as indigenous owners; third, it offers groups protection from reprisals and creates platforms for engaging powerful actors. These findings are significant because, for activists and scholars who work with subaltern groups in India or other contexts, they demonstrate that the orchestration of spirituality can strengthen action repertoires for self-empowerment and help groups secure or protect economic and social gains. The paper adds insights to research on social movements and organisations on how to strengthen the 'weapons of the weak'; it contributes empirical knowledge about how strategies to overcome debt and exploitation can succeed; and it underscores the importance of protecting freedom of religion and belief in development practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper re-focuses attention on the big picture question of the persistently low level of female labour force participation in India. • We show how attention on a binary indicator (in the labour force or out of it) misses a crucial aspect of women's economic/productive work. • We suggest that women's work in developing countries should be viewed in terms of at least three categories. • We find that the social norm that places the responsibility of domestic chores exclusively on women is primarily responsible for women's inability to participate in paid work. • We demonstrate the existence of 'virtuous cycles' within families: a history of working women in the family increases the probability of the woman being in paid work. Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In developing countries, women who are engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers, whereas the men are. We show that for women, not being in paid work is not synonymous with not being in the labour force. Women are often involved in expenditure saving activities i.e. productive work within the family, over and above domestic chores and care work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic work and unpaid (and therefore invisible) productive work that leads to mismeasurement of women's work and suggest methods to improve measurement. Counting women's expenditure-saving activities yields a substantially higher estimate of women's participation in economic work. On social norms, we show that religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of being in paid work. We find that being primarily responsible for domestic chores lowers the probability of "working", after accounting for all the conventional factors. Our data shows substantial unmet demand for paid work. Given that women are primarily responsible for domestic chores, we find that women express a demand for work that would be compatible with household chores. We demonstrate the existence of 'virtuous cycles' within families: a history of working women in the family (mother or mother-in-law ever worked) increases the probability of being in paid work between 18 and 21 percentage points. This suggests that the positive effects of increasing women's labour force participation today are likely to have positive multiplier effects on the prospects for work in future generations of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• India is a least likely case for welfare expansion, challenges dominant explanations and offers a new case. • Welfare expansion accompanied by deepening of democratic state is a legacy of civil society mobilization. • State-civil society dynamics can converge into sustained patterns of both policy and institutional transformation and defending the reforms against political attacks. In the past two decades India experienced an unprecedented expansion of the rights-based welfare. This expansion cut across a range of sectors − education, employment, public health, poverty reduction − but was also accompanied by a dramatic expansion and deepening of state institutions and a shift from patronage politics to citizen empowerment. In this paper we show that India was a least likely case for welfare expansion and that contrary to what the traditional welfare state literature suggests, civil society was a key driver of reform, but even more vitally has played a significant role in institutionalizing reforms, especially at the local level. We focus on the case of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the world's largest public works program, to discuss how civil society in India effectively framed welfare issues, mobilized to defend the law, helped institutionalize new governance structures like social audits by working with the state and are ensuring continuous accountability by cultivating what we call "user publics". We draw on the existing literature, fieldwork on village level welfare reform in different subnational regions of India, direct involvement in civil mobilization around rights based laws for over a decade and an ongoing project in which we are collaborating with some of the key architects of the reforms including an archive of over 3000 primary documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I am conducting a long-term study on how Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India take their place and deal with space. • This paper examines the stages between refugeehood and citizenship. • The results suggest that refugeehood is about complex day-to-day living practices that shape identities. • The refugee camp is more than a humanitarian space of assistance, more than a space of exception and biopolitical control. This article looks at subjectivities and regimes of homing from a position of liminality and questions the placements dynamics displayed by Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, India. Based on long-term and longitudinal fieldwork conducted in Keezhputhupattu refugee camp near Pondicherry between 2010 and 2023, this study analyses the experience of the refugees, which combines a "know-how" that they have developed due to a life in exile since 1983, which is linked, among other things, to a sometimes well-developed diasporic network; and a restrictive agency that has been granted to them by the Indian and Tamil Nadu authorities, which places them in a regime that is intended to be exceptional. The results of the study are significant and show how families spanning three generations may reproduce their new normalcy and negotiate their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Prior appropriation rights have played a unique role in expansion of Greater Mumbai since the 1970s. • Institutions play a key role in the evolution of resource geography in large metropolitan regions in Asia. • Contestation around water has intensified given the new emphasis on urbanization and industrialization in India. Animating the contemporary politics of water governance in India is a combination of institutional path dependence and a neo-liberal restructuring that has extended the ability of Indian cities to establish new forms of water entitlement in rural and peri-urban areas. This paper explores the politics of rural–urban water conflicts that are occurring in this changing political context. Building upon Schlager and Ostrom's conceptualization of operational and collective choice rules, it examines the role of agrarian institutions (primarily in the form of land rights) in shaping the politics of rural–urban water transfers in Mumbai and Chennai, two of India's largest and fastest-growing cities. By doing so, it makes the case that Mumbai's ability to secure water entitlement has been facilitated by an institutional legacy of prior appropriation that has been applied in a context of weak and limited tribal authority over land and resources. Chennai by contrast has become far more dependent upon the commodification of water in the form of quasi-market and allocation contracts, reflecting the riparian rights of commercial farmers in the Chennai region. The paper generates theoretical and empirical insights about the ways in which variations in urban and agrarian institutions affect the politics of rural–urban water allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Our paper explores the link between women's self-help groups and public entitlements. • It further examines the effect of SHG membership on social networks and mobility. • Empirical strategy employs matching methods to correct endogeneity of SHG membership. • Using data from rural India, we find that SHG members are more politically engaged. • SHG members are more likely to know of certain public entitlements than non-members. • SHG members are also more likely to avail of these public entitlement schemes. • SHG members also have wider social networks and greater mobility than non-members. Abstract Women's self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our understanding of ways in which SHGs improve awareness and use of public services is limited. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper first examines how SHG membership is associated with political participation, awareness, and use of government entitlement schemes. It further examines the effect of SHG membership on various measures of social networks and mobility. Using data collected in 2015 across five Indian states and matching methods to correct for endogeneity of SHG membership, we find that SHG members are more politically engaged. We also find that SHG members are not only more likely to know of certain public entitlements than non-members, they are significantly more likely to avail of a greater number of public entitlement schemes. Additionally, SHG members have wider social networks and greater mobility as compared to non-members. Our results suggest that SHGs have the potential to increase their members' ability to hold public entities accountable and demand what is rightfully theirs. An important insight, however, is that the SHGs themselves cannot be expected to increase knowledge of public entitlement schemes in absence of a deliberate effort to do so by an external agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We present evidence on short and long-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis on India's rural youth. • A third of those in salaried job lost their jobs, and half of those who worked out of state returned home after the lockdown. • While many male workers took up informal employment, most female workers dropped out of the labor force. • Using RCT, we find that a government-supported digital platform had no effect on job search intensity or employment. This paper presents evidence on the short and long-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis on India's rural youth. We interviewed about 2,000 vocational trainees from Bihar and Jharkhand three times after the first national lockdown in 2020, between June 2020 and December 2021. We find that a third of respondents who were in salaried jobs pre-lockdown lost their jobs, and half of those who worked out of state returned home shortly after the lockdown. We report a stark difference between men and women: while many male workers took up informal employment, most female workers dropped out of the labour force. In the second part of the paper, we use a randomised experiment to document the effects of a government-supported digital platform designed to provide jobs to low-skilled workers. The platform turned out to be difficult to use and publicised only few job ads. We find no effect on job search intensity or employment. Our findings suggest that bridging the gap between rural young workers and urban formal labour markets requires more active and targeted policy interventions, especially for female workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at patterns of growth faltering and catch up of around 1000 children as they moved from 8 to 19 years of age, from middle childhood through adolescence to young adulthood, using Height for Age Difference (HAD) and the more conventional Height for age z-scores (HAZ). It also looks at what individual and household characteristics may have moved these children into or out of situations of nutritional deprivation and how their stunting profile in later childhood correlates with psychosocial outcomes at age 19 and how it may have intergenerational consequences. The paper uses 4 rounds of longitudinal data collected in 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2013 from Andhra Pradesh and Telengana, India when the children were aged 8, 12, 15 and 19. The paper finds that there are significant gender based biases in growth faltering later in childhood disfavouring girls and that becoming newly stunted as an adolescent is strongly correlated with a child reporting to have poorer relationships with peers compared to the group that were never stunted. We also find that a girl experiencing stunting in middle childhood or adolescence (even if they were not stunted at age 8 or eventually moved out of being stunted by age 19) correlates significantly with offspring being shorter and thinner than the offspring of girls never stunted. This is one of few, if any, studies that look at growth patterns in middle childhood and adolescence and outcomes as a young adult and the results are important for their implications for further research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• To assess the trend of global income inequality, we must address the challenges of scarce and heterogeneous data and the diversity of opinions on what inequality means, which generates much uncertainty about the results. • This paper provides a new transparent and open-access dataset to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of global distributional changes since 1950 and their implications for inequality and overall welfare. • Inequality has unequivocally increased both between and within countries when considered in terms of dollar distances between people (absolute inequality). • When inequality is considered more as relative distances, the results are less robust. However, it can be said with a high degree of consensus that global inequality has declined since 2000, driven by strong growth in China, India, and other emerging countries, and will likely continue to do so for a few more years. • The main exceptions to the consensus on the decline in relative inequality after 2000 come from extreme sensitivity towards either end of the distribution (i.e., stagnation of the very poor or high concentration of income among the very rich). I analyze trends in global income distribution since 1950 using a new companion WIID dataset with standardized country income percentiles. I investigate the robustness of these trends with respect to key data choices, as well as the degree to which the inequality trend depends on specific distributional views (such as the use of absolute versus relative inequality, or relative emphasis at the bottom versus the top). The results show a robust increase in absolute inequality, along with a more nuanced trend in relative inequality, with a very robust decline after 2000 that was interrupted by the COVID crisis but is expected to continue at least until 2028. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in political institutions is considered to be distinctly crucial for maintaining the stability and legitimacy of such institutions. In this paper, I document an important channel through which characteristics of political institutions could affect political trust by studying the impact of a change in representation on political trust. I use the delimitation exercise of 2008 as a source of change in representation of districts within state legislatures in India and respondents' self-reported confidence in politicians and state government from two rounds of the IHDS (India Human Development Survey) as measures of political trust. Implementing a difference-in-differences strategy with a household panel, the estimates show that households living in districts that gained representatives in the state legislative assembly show an improvement in reported confidence in both politicians and the state government. There is no evidence of a symmetric negative effect for households living in districts that lose seats. Further, this improvement in confidence is accompanied by an improvement in economic performance as proxied by night time luminosity and is associated with an increase in voter turnout as well as a decrease in age and corruption of electoral candidates in gaining districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Programs that induce citizen participation to improve the quality of government at the local level are the subjects of large amounts of funding and intense debate. This paper combines a randomized control trial of a citizenship training and facilitation program in rural India, with an in-depth, four-year, ethnography of the intervention to understand the underlying mechanisms of change. The quantitative data show no impact from the intervention. Household and village survey data from 100 treatment and 100 control villages show considerable improvement across a wide variety of governance and participation indicators over time, but the differences in the changes between treatment and control villages are not statistically significant. The detailed qualitative data from a 10% subsample allow us to unpack the reasons why the intervention “failed” highlighting the role of variations in the quality of facilitation, lack of top-down support, and difficulties with confronting the stubborn challenge of persistent inequality. However, the qualitative investigation also uncovered subtle treatment effects that are difficult to observe in structured surveys. The paper thus demonstrates that a concerted effort to use “thick description” to uncover process of change using careful and detailed qualitative work can add value to standard impact evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary There has been a major expansion of social security programs in India during the last 15 years or so, along with wider recognition of economic and social rights. This paper discusses five programs that can be seen as partial foundations of a possible social security system for India: school meals, child care services, employment guarantee, food subsidies, and social security pensions. The record of these programs varies a great deal between Indian states, but there is growing evidence that they make an important contribution to human well-being, and also that the achievements of the leading states are gradually spreading to other states as well. Much scope remains for extending these efforts: despite the recent expansion, India’s social security system is still very limited in international perspective. The paper also discusses some general issues of social policy in India, such as the arguments for universalization versus targeting and the value of a rights approach to social security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper explores the recent fall in female labour force participation and its socio-economic determinants in India. The major contribution of this paper is: to explore both micro- and macro-level factors which determine female labour force participation rate (LFPR); to examine the “U shape” female LFPR, by examining the likely income and substitution effects of the real wage increase, to identify the sub-sectors within manufacturing and service sectors that could create jobs for new female job aspirants and those older women displaced from agriculture in recent years; and thus to understand the conditions under which female LFPR could be raised. Using both macro-level and household survey (NSS) data, we find that the recent fillip in the process of structural transformation has pushed a large number of females out of agriculture. The growing mechanization in agriculture and rising capital intensity in manufacturing sectors together have limited the opportunity for females because of their low education and skill and due to other cultural constraints. We also found that the rise in real wages in rural areas and the consequent improvement in the standard of living has produced a strong negative income effect which outweighs the positive substitution effect and as a result female LFPR has declined substantially. However, with the massive increase in female enrollment in secondary and higher levels of education, it could be expected that the substitution effect of the increase in real wage would become stronger if appropriate measures are taken by the government, which are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Compared to the extensive literature on measurement of poverty, the question of how the poor are distributed regionally has received less attention. This paper fills the gap in the literature by providing a conceptual framework to measure inequality in the distribution of the poor. A poverty segregation curve is used to compare a region’s share of the poor population with its share in the overall population. A unique contribution of the paper is formulating a generalized version of the poverty segregation curve. Unlike the segregation curve, the generalized segregation curve also takes average poverty rates into account while ranking distributions. Thus the generalized segregation curve may rank a distribution with substantially lower poverty rates above a distribution with higher poverty rates, when differences between their segregation curves are relatively small. The segregation curves are used to analyze changes in the distribution of the poor in India since the economic reforms in the early 1990s. Poverty rates and shares among all states, territories, and districts in India are estimated using data from the National Sample Survey Organization in 1994, 2004, and 2010. In the decades following the reforms India witnessed high growth rates and declining poverty rates. Despite the reduction in poverty, our analysis is the first to reveal that there was a significant rise in segregation of the poor over time. Some states had disproportionately high share of the poor compared to their share in the total population. Within states, the extent of segregation was lower among some of the poorest states and higher in less poor states. The generalized segregation curves show that the substantial decline in poverty rates since the reforms was not adequate to compensate the rise in segregation of the poor. Increase in segregation was also evident when the poor are identified as those who lacked education, health, and access to basic services. Reducing the segregation of the poor is important if India is to attain regionally balanced economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper estimates slum residents’ willingness to pay for formalized land tenure in Pune, India. The results show that the legal assurance of slum residents’ occupancy of their lands could benefit them. Previous studies have discussed the legal and non-legal factors that substantially influence the tenure security of residents in informal settlements; however, it remains unclear how and to what extent the assignment of legal property rights through the formalization of land tenure improves the tenure security of residents in informal settlements and living conditions, even in the presence of other legal and non-legal factors that also contribute to their tenure security. To address this question, this study focuses on the city of Pune, India, where government agencies have formalized slums by legally ensuring the occupancy of the residents under the “slum declaration.” Applying a hedonic price model to an original household survey, this paper investigates how slum residents evaluate formalized land tenure. A spatial econometrics method is also applied to account for spatial dependence and spatially autocorrelated unobserved errors. The spatial hedonic analysis shows that the premium of slum declaration is worth 19.2% of the average housing rent in slums. The associated marginal willingness to pay is equivalent to 6.7% of the average household expenditure, although it is heterogeneous depending on a household’s caste and other legal conditions. This finding suggests that the assurance of occupancy rights is a vital component of land-tenure formalization policy even if it does not directly provide full property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper analyzes a unique data set that details the daily advertisements on Information, Education and Communication (IEC) material to avert heat stroke mortality in different media used by the state government of Odisha, India and the actual daily heat-wave mortalities in the state over a period of eight years. The paper then investigates the relative effectiveness of the different media in reducing mortality econometrically. The government adopted awareness generation as an adaptation strategy for heat waves in the year 2003 and intensified the use of public media from 2007 when multiple newspapers and radio and television channels were used for dissemination. I analyze the district-level daily death occurrences due to heat stroke using both linear and non-linear econometric models. Media used on the same day or on previous days are represented in the models by grouping them as either print, audio or video media. The data used is a daily panel data set consisting of only summer days (15th March–20th June) for the years 2005–12 for each of the 30 districts of the state. The estimated models account for the gap in data and the multidimensional nature of the panel (days, months, years). The results show the repeated use of video media to be the most effective in reducing deaths followed by newspapers and radio. The paper’s novel contribution is the use of secondary data to evaluate media and compare media effect of public health communication strategies in a developing country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between social diversity and state-provided public goods is a central political economy problem. This paper highlights how status inequality is a distinct political channel when diverse groups are spatially segregated. Social status impacts citizens' ability to petition the state successfully and modulates state favoritism or discrimination. We use data from nearly 600,000 Indian villages to show that caste-based status inequality modifies the effect of diversity on local public goods politics. Diversity only negatively impacts local public goods in units where lower-caste groups are numerically preponderant. Such diversity deficit is further amplified when higher-caste groups numerically dominate larger administrative units and lower-caste groups are segregated. • We revisit the theoretical and empirical relationship between status-inequality and development, at a local scale. • We show that when local units are dominated by lower-status groups, public goods are negatively associated with diversity. • The association reverses when higher-status groups are numerically preponderant. • We also show that spatial segregation modulates diversity-development association much to the detriment of low-status groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Agenda 2030 commitment to LNOB operates as a form of 'doublespeak' in India. • The Agenda 2030 call to end extreme inequality requires facilitating the 'hegemonic struggle'. • The absence of religion in Agenda 2030 masks the way that religion is leveraged by populists. • Pastoralism is a 'pious occupation' where religion shapes connections to the land and animals. • Religion is an important factor in the hegemonic struggle that the LNOB commitment should enable. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development pledged to 'leave no one behind' (LNOB). This article suggests that LNOB can be a form of 'doublespeak', susceptible to being used to mask ideologies and policies that worsen social, political and religious divisions. Despite stated commitments to LNOB, both Agenda 2030 and the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of India adhere to narrow models of development that fail to address and exacerbate the growing problem of religious and other inequalities. This article argues for reclaiming LNOB's radical potential by conceptualising it as an empty signifier that takes on meaning through the hegemonic struggle to articulate what 'left behind' means. It develops this argument through a case study of Hindu Nationalist developmental normativity and two mobile pastoralist communities in Gujarat: Hindu Rabaris and Sufi Muslim Fakirani Jats. The empirical data show that in Gujarat's marketised neo-liberal land regime, mobile pastoralism as a livelihood is increasingly stressed and liable to be constructed as 'left behind'. Simultaneously, the Hindu and Sufi religious practices that shaped pastoralists' relationships with land and animals are being transformed and, framed by the BJP government's promotion of a Hindu nationalist religious identity, are shifting towards adoption of communal Hindu and Muslim identities that exacerbate social and religious inequalities, with particular effects on women. The paper concludes that LNOB has potential to tackle religious and other inequalities and generate a more radical and democratic politics of development if the range of demands that are met by this 'empty signifier' is broadened to challenge the hegemonic representations that dominate, and religion's centrality in this struggle is recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Transfer preferences of middle-level bureaucrats shape spatial disparities in local state presence. • Bureaucrats regularly lobby against transfer orders that do not align with their preferences. • Bureaucrats prefer jurisdictions close to their home locations and avoid relocating over long distances. • Jurisdictions less preferred by bureaucrats are more likely to experience state absence. • Regional disparities in the representation of bureaucrats impact the distribution of local state absence. Most states lack the ability to maintain a uniform presence at the local level. While in some places, citizens experience an attentive and present state that is quick to address their demands, in other parts, the same state can be unresponsive and absent. The unevenness in state presence shapes its capacity to delivery services and its legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens. What explains the spatial unevenness in local state presence? This paper argues that the transfer preferences of mid-level bureaucrats are an important determinant of local state presence. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines insights from qualitative fieldwork and a unique dataset on the transfers history of mid-level bureaucrats in Indian land bureaucracy, I show that bureaucrats have strong transfer preferences and regularly lobby to avoid being placed in jurisdictions further away from their homes or being relocated over long distances. Jurisdictions less preferred by bureaucrats are more likely to experience state absence at the local level. Further, spatial disparities in local state absence are concentrated according to historical patterns of development across different regions of the state; historically less developed regions with lower bureaucratic representation within the state and experience a more prolonged duration of bureaucratic absence on account of bureaucratic lobbying against transfer directives. This paper highlights the importance of transfer preferences of individual bureaucrats and their collective representation in shaping the quality of local governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Sen’s entitlement thesis rooted in social contract theory has been used to explain access to food, and is used by states to design social protection programs as transfer entitlements to diffuse food insecurities. Social protection programs have now burgeoned in several countries as a strategy to enable the poor to overcome risks, vulnerabilities and poverty. These social protection programs have inclusion and exclusion errors, which current theorization attributes mainly to political clientalism, social vulnerability, elite capture, targeting inefficiency, leakages and corruption, lack of information transparency and improper designing of social protection programs. This paper argues that the errors are due to a more fundamental assumption made in application of social contract and entitlement-based approach to social protection programing. It identifies an uncritical application of Sen’s entitlement thesis to social protection programs, as leading to inclusion and exclusion errors. The main problematic, the paper shows is that the social contract-led entitlement thesis works within the domain of formal rights situated within the state-citizen relations, and as such, misses out on the non-formal entitlements and non-state influences that impact materialization of social protection programs in practice. Evidences from flood prone Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, India indicate that non-state rules linked with clientele and patronage relations, moral and local political economies trump over formal rights to mediate social protection entitlement outcomes. Rather than abstract state-citizen social contract, it is the moral contracts of reciprocal exchanges with influential patrons embedded in the moral economy of the villages that ultimately ground the social protection entitlement claims of poor villagers. Conceptualizing this process of access as cultures of entitlement, the paper builds a framework for reinterpretation of entitlements and their outcomes, suggesting a recalibration of application of Sen’s entitlement thesis to social protection programs. In conclusion it argues that Sen’s entitlement thesis which is pitched at transfer of economic resources through social protection from the state to the poor is inadequate. Learning from social movements currently leading the transparency and accountability struggles in India, it calls for an instituting and recognition of accountability as new cultural resource and entitlement. In conclusion it argues that information, and accountability as new cultural entitlements, when mobilized through collective agency of the poor can potentially challenge the current cultures of entitlements evidenced in this paper that presently underlie social protection outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The role of industry associations in shaping policy through various lobbying activities is well established. In most cases, while such activities are deemed essential from an industry perspective, they also carry negative connotations connected to narrow rent-seeking and the pursuit of elites’ interests which run counter to the public good and discourage competition and subsequent innovation. As such, industry associations have long been excluded from discussions regarding the relational dynamics and evolution of innovation systems. In contrast, this paper builds upon more recent work that places industry associations as key intermediary actors that facilitate knowledge exchange and institutional capacity building, particularly in the context of developing countries where limited institutional capacities and substantial knowledge gaps can limit both innovation and development. Employing a qualitative cross-national comparison, this paper examines the changing roles and activities of biopharmaceutical industry associations in the development of the South African and Indian pharmaceutical industries, with a particular focus on government–industry relations. For doing so, the paper captures developments during three main periods through which both the South African and Indian biopharmaceutical industries have similarly evolved, although within different national contexts: (1) pre-liberalization, (2) expanding pluralism, and (3) increasing partnership. We argue that in South Africa and India, particular historical trajectories and lack of institutional capacities are shifting industry associations away from ineffective lobbying to a new political approach that emphasizes partnering with government in the pursuit of not only narrow industry objectives, but also broader development aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary International trade in medicinal herbal products is growing, while value chains are becoming more complex and governed by a range of public and private standards. There is a debate over the extent to which phytomedicine production can be beneficial for farmers in low- and middle-income countries. More generally, there are varied views about the extent to which small farmers are disadvantaged by stringent public health and private consumer standards in northern markets for agricultural products. This paper proves a comparative analysis of value chains, using case studies of turmeric production in India. It marries a qualitative investigation of turmeric producing sites in India with an investigation into the chemical quality of various turmeric products. The aim of the paper is to understand the way that varied structure and governance of value chains changes the benefits to both producer and consumer. When production is for the organic northern market, we found evidence of a “captive” value chain, where the lead firm requires strict adherence to conditions of production and processing. Prices for farmers were relatively stable, at a reasonably high level. In contrast, where farmers were producing for local markets, including the major auction at Erode, prices were volatile and farmers bore considerable risk. We found that competition and volatility in the market-based chain can lead to turmeric adulteration and contamination, both intentional and unintentional. Our case study suggests that many small turmeric farmers would find it difficult to meet both public and private health standards, in contrast to some academic literature that argues that public health standards do not discriminate against small farmers. More than this, our study adds to the discussion of the impact of standards, suggesting clear consumer benefits in northern markets. However, there are also indications that only larger and more dynamic farmers can participate in the lucrative phytomedicine trade. As such, our study tentatively supports previous literature suggesting that the application of standards in northern markets lead to increasing farmer differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Three studies in India and Bangladesh use pro-WEAI to examine empowerment impacts of agricultural interventions and labor market changes. • Pro-WEAI shows potential in detecting empowerment impacts within the project lifespan. • Findings suggest the need for intentionality in designing women's empowerment projects. • It is important to collect data on both women and men to track progress toward both women's empowerment and gender equality. This introduction to a special section describes how a recently developed measure, the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) can be used to assess empowerment impacts of agricultural development interventions in India and Bangladesh as well as broader changes in rural labor markets. The special section comprises three papers. The first examines the impact of membership in self-help groups in five states in rural India on women's and men's empowerment and gender equality. The second presents experimental evidence from a pilot project in Bangladesh that provided trainings in agricultural extension, nutrition behavior change communication, and gender sensitization to husbands and wives together. The third investigates changes in women's roles within the jute value chain in the Southern Delta region of Bangladesh as household members migrate out of the study area and the availability of male labor declines. Although these papers focus on Bangladesh and India, pro-WEAI can be applied to impact assessments of agricultural development projects more generally. The three papers show both the usefulness of this new measure in detecting changes in empowerment indicators within the lifespan of a project and the value of having explicit empowerment objectives in agricultural development projects. The papers also demonstrate the value of having data on both men and women so that project designers can be more intentional about including both of them and monitoring outcomes for both to promote more gender equitable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Countries with populations and economic activity concentrated in low-lying coastal regions are vulnerable to sea-level rise. • As the ocean advances inland, millions of coastal inhabitants will have to retreat, either by choice or force majeure. • Linkages among environmental stress, public assistance and population change are assessed for coastal India and Bangladesh. • Compensatory public assistance strongly dampens the migration response to rising environmental stress. • Damage compensation should direct public resources to households that choose to relocate as the coastal threat mounts. Linkages among climate change–related environmental stress, public assistance, and the spatial pattern of population change are assessed for neighboring coastal areas of India and Bangladesh. Environmental stress is measured using historical cyclone impacts, salinization, and land loss from erosion. Household migration decisions are based on current and expected future income streams in different locations. Rising environmental damage raises costs, but it may also induce increased public assistance that moderates or neutralizes those costs, diminishing migration incentives, even in areas hard-hit by climate change. Econometric estimates for the Sundarbans region shared by India and Bangladesh suggest that endogenous public assistance strongly dampens the migration response to rising environmental stress in both countries, though the assistance response and migration dampening are lower in Bangladesh. A broader analysis for the coastal region from India's Odisha State to eastern Bangladesh finds that present and past cyclone impacts are highly significant for explaining coastal population changes, although responses are lower in India because of lower environmental stress and greater public-assistance intensity. A counterfactual simulation suggests that, as a result of cyclones since 1970, the affected regions are 8–10% less populous in Bangladesh but only 2% less populous in India. The paper's findings motivate a discussion of the implications for alternative policy regimes as land erosion increases, and sea-level rise and salinization continue with climate change. After comparing the efficiency and equity of regimes that provide universal damage compensation or leave coastal households to fend for themselves, the paper suggests an alternative approach that focuses public resources on compensation for households that choose to relocate as the coastal threat mounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper contributes to the impact evaluation of GIs by carrying out a case study of Basmati rice in India. Although Basmati rice is not yet an official GI, its long standing reputation for quality and GI-like protection by major importing countries except the United States (US) has rendered it a mirror image of a GI good. The analysis is based on a survey of 299 Basmati and nonBasmati rice farmers in Uttarakhand, one of the Northern states [1] India, officially Republic of India is a republic comprised of 28 constituent states and seven Union territories. These states and union territories are partially self-governing states or regions united by a central (federal) government. In India, this self-governing status of the component states is typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of the central government. 1 of India. The empirical strategy of the paper is three-pronged. First, a net income analysis has been carried out to elicit the net benefits of Basmati rice as opposed to nonBasmati rice and another competing crop in that region such as sugarcane. The findings show that Basmati rice is more profitable than the nonBasmati varieties but less so than sugarcane. In the second stage, the endogeneity-corrected Heckman selection model reveals that Basmati adoption has increased welfare of the households. Finally, a Tobit model is estimated to investigate the determining factors of Basmati adoption among the farmer households. The determining factors are found to be access to extension training facilities, a credible hedge against risk, and the availability of household labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper attempts to quantify the impact of fiscal decentralization in India on its social infrastructure and on rural development. Overall, the results in this paper indicate that Government of India within a federal framework has been fostering development equitably across its states, particularly through health and education expenditures aimed at improving human capital development. In this context, the importance of the two tier centre-states decentralization should be noted. However, the third tier of local governance, particularly the state-rural local bodies decentralization has been dismal and has not achieved significant results across states, which warrant the attention of the central and state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I examine the distributional dynamics of establishment total factor productivity growth within India's manufacturing sector from 2001–2015. • I estimate separate rates of conditional convergence to the foreign and domestically owned components of the within industry productivity frontier. • I find positive overall convergence, but convergence to the foreign owned component of the within industry frontier is substantially dampened. • These findings imply significant differences in the nature of technology transfer from highly productive domestic and foreign firms. Inward foreign direct investment (FDI) has the potential to be an important conduit for technology transfer to developing countries. However, a large body of empirical research has found that the realized benefit to domestic productivity is minimal. This apparent absence of productivity spillovers from FDI is particularly surprising in light of recent evidence that firms in developing countries exhibit positive productivity convergence, or catch-up, to their industry's productivity frontier. In this paper, I use establishment level panel data from 21 distinct industries within India's manufacturing sector from 2001–2015 to provide new evidence on this issue. I analyze establishment total factor productivity conditional convergence and examine if the presence of foreign owned establishments within each industry's productivity frontier impacts this relationship. While I find statistically and quantitatively significant conditional convergence to the overall frontier, I show that convergence to the foreign owned component of the frontier is markedly slower. I corroborate this finding by exploring the impact of foreign ownership in the frontier on the dynamics of the within industry productivity distribution. This robust result suggests differences in the nature of technology transfer from highly productive domestic and foreign firms. I argue that my general econometric approach helps to reconcile the previously disconnected findings of negligible spillovers from FDI in developing countries with evidence of positive productivity convergence and the substantial presence of foreign firms in the productivity frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A joint analysis of health insurance and hospitalization addressing endogeneity. • Higher uptake of insurance by chronically ill people indicates adverse selection. • Hospitalization increases with health insurance indicate a possible moral hazard. • Identifying thresholds of the continuous covariates with observed non-linear patterns. • Chronically ill females, older adults, rural residents are often neglected. The Indian healthcare sector is growing at a rapid pace; nevertheless, inequality in healthcare consumption and catastrophic healthcare expenditure is also increasing at an alarming rate. In addition to socioeconomic differences, poor healthcare infrastructure, and inadequate risk-pooling mechanisms; asymmetric information in the healthcare market is also a potential contributor to this inequity and increasing costs. The consequences of information asymmetry are adverse selection (AS) and moral hazard (MH). AS occurs if people with health risks (high-risk individuals) are more prone to buying health insurance as compared to low-risk individuals. MH occurs when insured individuals are more likely to use healthcare than the uninsured individuals, inflating insurance premiums and medical care costs. Empirically, AS and MH lead to endogeneity due to unobserved heterogeneity. In practice, endogeneity is often addressed by using the instrumental variable estimation technique; however, this approach suffers from identification problems. Therefore, in this paper, we use an instrument-free semi-parametric copula regression technique to examine how health insurance status affects hospitalization using a sample of individuals from a large nationally representative survey for India. Our results suggest the presence of AS and potential MH in the Indian healthcare market. We observe that chronically ill individuals are probable sources of AS, which leads to possible MH. A spline regression analysis suggests nonlinearity in health insurance choice and healthcare utilization across age, education, family size, and household consumption expenditure. We find chronically ill women in India exhibit less insurance coverage and lower hospital care usage. We also identify the vulnerable groups, such as older adults and rural residents, who have low insurance participation and high healthcare consumption. Our results indicate toward the need for evidence-based health care policy to manage the healthcare system and support the disadvantaged population of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The study examines the role of co-residing family members in married women's decision to take up non-farm work. • Living in a joint family lowers women's non-farm employment in rural India by around 12% points. • Less autonomy rather than higher family income or elderly care is the main obstacle to join non-farm work. • Adverse impact is higher for women with less education, from higher social status and from Northern India. • Accessibility to jobs and availability of childcare reduce the adverse impact of joint family on women's work. Abstract This paper investigates if residing in a joint family affects non-farm employment for married women in rural India. Our estimates based on a longitudinal survey of over 27,000 women conducted in 2005 and 2012, and using the conditional logistic regression and instrumental variable approach suggest that living in a joint family lowers married women's participation non-farm work by around 12% points. The adverse impact is higher for younger women, for those from families with higher social status, and for those residing in Northern India. We present evidence to suggest that women with higher education are not constrained from cultural and traditional norms since education raises women's decision-making power in a joint family. An increased education level is likely to raise women's earning capacity as well as the quality of jobs which may help in lowering family pressure against work. Public policies that encourage higher education, improve job accessibility along with affordable childcare, will raise non-farm employment, which has increasingly been the main source of new jobs, for women living in a rural India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The paper critically reviews the arguments for and against both employment guarantees and income guarantees when viewed as rights-based policy instruments for poverty reduction in a developing economy. Decentralized implementation of the right-to-work poses serious challenges in poor places. Evidence on India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act does not suggest that the potential for either providing work when needed or reducing current poverty is realized, despite pro-poor targeting. Instead, work is often rationed by local leaders, and the poverty impact is small when all the costs are considered. The option of income support using cash transfers also has both pros and cons. Widely-used methods for finely targeting cash transfers tend to miss many poor people, and can discourage those reached from earning extra income. Yet it cannot be presumed that switching to a universal basic income will reduce poverty more than workfare or finely-targeted transfers. That is an empirical question and the answer will undoubtedly vary across settings, belying the generalizations often heard from advocates. Nonetheless, more incentive-neutral, universal and/or state-contingent transfer schemes merit consideration in settings in which existing public spending is skewed against poor people and/or there is scope for raising taxes on the rich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • I examine whether households' consumption is influenced by that of their peers using Indian data. • I employ an instrumental variables/fixed effects approach. • I find robust evidence of peer effects in consumption. • Thus policies that influence household consumption are likely to have social spillovers. Abstract This paper examines peer effects in consumption in context of a less developed country. Specifically, the question that I seek to answer is whether consumption expenditure of a household is influenced by that of its peers in a less developed country. To examine this question, I use newly available household level data from India. I define a household's peer group as other households living in its village/neighborhood. In assessing the influences of peers in this context, there are two key empirical challenges including shared group-level unobservables, and simultaneity of peer influences. I address these issues by using an instrumental variables/fixed effects approach that compares households in the same district but different villages/neighborhoods who are thus exposed to different sets of peers. In particular, I use plausibly exogenous variation in idiosyncratic expenditure shocks – which are accidental and negative in nature – faced by peers as instruments for peers' consumption expenditure. Preferred specification suggests that a one standard deviation increase in average consumption expenditure of a household's peers causes the household's own consumption expenditure to increase by 0.42 standard deviations. Falsification tests and robustness checks support the validity of my results. My findings suggest that policies that influence a household's consumption will also affect the consumption of the household's peers through social interactions. This implies traditional analyses of consumption intervention programs that do not take into account such spillover effects will understate the total social impact of the programs, and hence lead to inaccurate evaluation of cost-effectiveness of such programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that ethnic diversity negatively influences public goods provision through a longitudinal study of the Indian state of Kerala, which has attained exceptional levels of social development despite high fragmentation along religious and caste lines. This paper argues that it is not objective diversity but a subjective sense of “we-ness,” which is the key determinant of the level of public goods provision and social development. A historical analysis of Kerala illustrates how a cohesive subnational community generates progressive social policy as well as societal monitoring of schools and clinics, which together give rise to relatively high levels of education and health outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights • Past assessments of workfare schemes are inconsistent with the policy rationale in poor rural economies. • A new evaluation method is implemented for India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. • Targeting performance is good but not enough to compensate for the loss from work requirements. • The policy ranking switches in favor of a basic-income guarantee over workfare. Abstract Prevailing methods for evaluating workfare schemes are inconsistent with the arguments made for workfare in poor rural economies. Those arguments emphasize the existence of higher involuntary underemployment among the poor and the fact that the type of work provided by these schemes gives disutility, deterring non-poor households from participating. To include these features, the consumption-based welfare metric used in past assessments of workfare schemes in underemployed developing countries is generalized to incorporate a welfare loss from casual manual work, while allowing the government to independently value the work done for other reasons. Using data for India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the paper shows that the policy ranking switches in favor of a basic-income guarantee (BIG) over workfare. Allowing for a welfare loss from casual manual labor implies a more “poor-poor” targeting performance, but this is not sufficient to compensate for the direct welfare loss from the work requirement for plausible parameter values. A BIG dominates NREGS for a given total outlay on workfare wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Recent, “rights-based approaches” offer a promising route for bringing about social change. However, we have little experience with state-provided legally enforceable socio-economic rights. This paper examines one of the few examples of a legally granted socio-economic right—a limited “right to work”—that has existed in one state of India for over 25 years in the form of the Employment Guarantee Scheme. The paper argues that legal underpinnings do not automatically enable the poor to obtain rights; however, legal rights have important indirect effects for pro-poor activist organizations including mobilizing membership, protecting activists from arbitrary action, and shifting public discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Public participation is generally assumed to be a necessary if not fundamental condition for development. Most studies do not, however, question the kind and level of collective action that would be desirable. This paper provides a novel empirical analysis of the impact of collective action on economic development using data for South India. The paper models collective action as endogenous to economic development and distinguishes between its static and dynamic properties. The results show that while excessive activism may harm state income, collective action in the context of responsible bargaining systems may contribute toward increased economic development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reflects on the functioning and shortcomings of the Food-For-Work (FFW) program in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh. Drawing upon 12 months of primary field research conducted in 2001-02, it shows how design faults, administrative mismanagement, and local power relations excluded very poor and lower caste people from participating in the program. The main problem areas were ineffective village assemblies (Gram Sabhas), the engagement of "con- tractors," the selection of beneficiaries by contractors, inappropriate wage setting, payments in cash instead of grain, the use of labor-displacing machinery, and disregard of the labor:material ratio in works executed. The paper concludes with policy lessons for improving the design and implementation of future FFW programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines changes in the patterns of skills development for Indian workers in domestic firms, particularly in small firms, in the 1990s, when its economy became increasingly integrated into the global economy. A case study of 50 component suppliers of two leading auto assemblers in the Indian automobile industry reveals that dynamic industrial transformations in the 1990s significantly changed the nature, content and extent of skills development at domestic suppliers. The paper argues that various institutional mechanisms created by assembler firms played a critical role in upgrading skills at suppliers, transforming the supply chain into a learning chain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Most of the available studies on commodity chains and upgrading pursue a narrow economic view. This paper points to the need for mapping the social linkages of production and movement of commodities. In relation to upgrading, the paper emphasizes the importance of looking at their social implications. Toward these goals, the paper advances the idea of socially embedding the commodity chain. The idea is demonstrated by examining, from a long-run historical perspective, the global coir yarn commodity chain of southern India. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Viewing chronic poverty in terms of extended duration, severity and multidimensional deprivation, this paper uses existing literature to draw attention to those people in India for whom poverty is intractable. Two sets of approaches are used: an area-based approach and an historically marginalized groups-based approach. The area-based approach maps the location of the chronically poor by identifying states and regions that have been especially vulnerable to poverty in terms of severity and multidimensionality. It focuses on drylands and forest-based regions. The historically marginalized groups approach draws attention to groups who have suffered multiple deprivations for long periods. Chronic poverty is disproportionately high among casual agricultural laborers, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. In conclusion, the paper briefly reviews the factors that contribute to chronic poverty and the efficacy of policies to reduce such deprivation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we show that local redistribution of educational resources via teacher transfers between neighboring public schools can improve equity in access to teachers. Transfers from teacher surplus schools to deficit schools within a 10 km radius in Haryana, a state of India for which we have geo-coded location of schools in 2013, enables 19 percent of deficit schools to meet the minimum requirement. We use the mandated norms in the Right to Education Act in India, to define deficit and surplus schools. In the process we also provide a characterization of schools that are in deficit and those in surplus. We find that connectedness, the social composition of the enrolled students, the income of the neighborhood are important determinants of a school being in deficit. Surplus schools mirror the results on deficit, but not always so: they are far more heterogenous, leading to possibilities that they may in fact be no different than some low shortage deficit schools. Keeping in the background this heterogeneity in surplus schools, we design local transfers between schools and evaluate them on how well they match characteristics of the donor and recipient schools. The chosen algorithm is compared to another transfer rule that reduces the variance of shortages across schools and is found to be better in matching characteristics, that is, the donor and recipient schools are, on an average, matched in characteristics: in terms of the development of the region, its rural/urban location, connectivity and school characteristics. A comparison of transfers that follow our redistribution rule to transfers resulting from an actual transfer policy shows that while our rule removes deficits in rural areas, the actual transfers favored more developed regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on the relationship between public and private investment in India along the following dimensions. First, acknowledging major structural changes that the Indian economy has undergone in the past three decades, we study whether public investment in recent years has become more or less complementary to private investment in comparison to the period before 1980. Second, we construct a novel data-set of quarterly aggregate public and private investment in India over the period 1996–2015 using investment-project data from the CapEx-CMIE database. Third, embedding a theory-driven long-run relationship on the model, we estimate a range of Structural Vector Error Correction Models (SVECMs) to re-examine the public and private investment relationship in India. Identification is achieved by decomposing shocks into those with transitory and permanent effects. Our results suggest that while public investment crowds out private investment in India over the period 1950–2012, the opposite is true when we restrict the sample to post 1980 or conduct a quarterly analysis since 1996. This change can likely be attributed to the policy reforms which started during the early 1980s and gained momentum after the 1991 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the impact of security expenditures from military alliances involving third-party intervention on violent incidents from non-state actors. Our main learning is a rather surprising fact that at a lower level of security expenditure in the violence affected area, an increase in security expenditures leads to an increase in violent incidents (rather than a decrease); and only at higher level of security expenditure in the area, an increase in security expenditure leads to a decline in violent incidents. For the analysis, we use a novel dataset on naxalite violence obtained directly from the police head-quarters of the three most affected states in India. The data consists of 64 districts spanning over years 2001 till 2013 and includes information on the annual number of violent incidents and the size of the security forces allocated specifically to curb the naxalite violence. We use negative binomial regression model with the number of violent incidents as the dependent variable and lagged size of security forces as the independent variable, while controlling for other relevant variables. Further, to address issues of potential reverse causality, we use a propensity score matching technique to infer the causal nature of such an association. We also argue that when the union government intervenes as a third party to support the state governments to fight the naxalites, the latter may be under-funding by free riding. However, despite such underfunding, if the overall contribution is positive and continued, eventually the concentration of security forces in an area will overwhelm the naxalites and reduce the incidents. Lastly, we highlight that though the mainstream literature on civil wars has used per capita income as a proxy for security expenditures, it becomes inappropriate when a more direct measure of security expenditures is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate variability has been shown to have adverse effects on morbidity and mortality. Less is known about its effects on psychological well-being, especially in developing countries with agriculture-based economies. In this paper, we test whether extreme temperature and precipitation in India have an effect on self-reported depression symptoms, cognitive and sleep difficulties, and ability to cope with and control life. We use time and geographic variation in weather and show that hot weather in the previous year worsens psychological well-being among rural, but not urban, Indian adults. We examine potential mechanisms and show that the effect is largely driven by hot temperatures during the agricultural season and could be partly attributed to a reduction in agricultural production. We further provide suggestive evidence that the effects of weather shocks could be mitigated with poverty reduction programs such as India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Poor mental health has been associated with low productivity and high healthcare expenditures and is a serious concern in India and many developing countries. The adverse impacts of climate change on rural, agriculture-based economies such as India are likely to increase over time. Given that nearly half of the global population lives in rural areas and is vulnerable to climate variability, understanding the effects of climate on psychological well-being and identifying potential resolutions is critical for insuring vulnerable populations and breaking the poverty cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universal school enrolment of children aged 6–14 years has been a commitment enshrined in the Indian constitution since 1950. To attain this goal, the central government has set up a range of programs, such as incentive programs, teacher grants and infrastructure grants, while state governments share responsibility in implementing those educational policy initiatives. This paper reviews the progress of India’s primary schools over the period 2005–2011 as public educational undertaking shifted more from the centre to the states. Using two waves of the Indian Human Development Survey conducted in 2005 and 2011, we track the progress of primary schools in terms of infrastructure upgrade, teachers’ quality, the costs of education, enrolment and learning outcomes. We find that while progress has been made in terms of infrastructure provision and enrolment, other aspects have either seen no progress or have worsened over time, and numerical and reading skills of children 8–11 years old worsening over time. Better performing states are generally in the South and in the extreme North. However, in terms of learning outcomes, the abysmal results are nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries despite substantial improvements in education levels and economic development. One potential explanation for the persistence of this phenomenon is that individual household members like the mother derive large non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son and therefore prefer boys to girls. Qualitative evidence suggests that such benefits exist and may depend on the child’s age. This paper uses large nationally representative datasets from India and tests whether having a son leads to higher decision-making powers for mothers than having a daughter. Since the number and gender composition of children is likely to be non-random for families that want a son, I focus on first-born children for whom the sex ratio of girls relative to boys is normal. The main analysis also focuses on young children of up to six months, which gives parents little time to adjust desired birth-spacing intervals that could be systematically correlated with decision-making powers and child gender. The results show little evidence of consistently large female benefits shortly after birth, and any positive impacts of having a son disappear after the first six months. There are also no large benefits for adult sons. These empirical patterns do not support qualitative evidence suggesting that women benefit from the birth of a son through larger decision-making powers in the household because of increased respect by other household members. The benefits also do not heavily depend on the child’s age, which is not consistent with a channel predicting a better bargaining position for women with adult sons who start taking over the running of the household. Overall, these results extend our understanding of individual-specific incentives for son preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender discrimination within the household exists in many contexts. In societies where the norm is to not expect future support from daughters, parents may invest even less in the health and human capital of girls. In India, as in other patriarchal societies, the eldest son occupies a special position as the potential head of the extended family and is expected to assume responsibility for parents' welfare in their old age. In this paper, I explore intra-household differences in educational expenditure and enrollment for children by gender and birth order. Using child level data from the nationally representative India Human Development Survey-II (2011–12), I confirm the presence of a pro-male bias and an additional preference for the eldest son. In families with more children and greater competition for resources within the household, the pro-male bias falls and the bias in favor of the eldest son is greater. Parents in the higher income bracket, who are also less likely to be dependent on their children, discriminate less in favor of the eldest son. As expected, pro-male bias is highest in the north, central and eastern zones of the country. The north-eastern zone exhibits the lowest levels of intra household discrimination based on gender. Finally, I find evidence suggesting reverse discrimination, i.e. discrimination against sons, in the state of Meghalaya which follows a rare matrilineal system where the youngest daughter takes over as the head of the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data collection methods and poverty measures have not caught up with the reality of an increasingly urbanised world; as a result, urban poverty may be underestimated. This has important implications for targeting interventions and allocating resources in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Several problems affect the measurement of urban poverty: definitions of ‘slum’ settlements vary widely, data collection may undercount slum populations, insufficient data disaggregation may conceal intra-city disparities, and common indicators and assumptions may be ill-suited to assessing both income and multidimensional poverty in urban contexts. However, not enough is known about the extent to which these issues affect the resulting estimates. This paper contributes to the existing literature by illustrating the scale of the bias associated with common practices in measuring urban poverty at different stages of the production of poverty estimates. The analysis draws on selected examples in the literature alongside new analysis of data from Demographic and Health Surveys and Household Income and Expenditure Surveys. The article also provides recommendations on how to address each of these problems to improve urban poverty measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Since the first decade of the 2000s, there has been serious concern that public interest litigation (PIL) in India, which was launched by the Supreme Court in the late 1970s to protect the rights of weaker sections of the society, has come to be occasionally used against them instead. Can PIL in India truly serve as a model for other developing countries in promoting the basic rights of their citizens? Reconsidering the conditions that enable the judiciary to engage in judicial activism through PIL, this paper argues that writ jurisdiction is the key factor in considering the peculiarity and sustainability of Indian PIL, as the unique development of its jurisdiction has contributed to increased power for judges in delivering social justice to society and has also opened the possibility of judges pursuing their own agendas through the resulting informalization of procedure and remedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper finds that Christian children 0–59 months of age are less likely to be stunted as compared to non-Christian children. • The advantage is especially evident for girls, less so for boys. • Mechanisms include access to historical schools and hospitals/pharmacies that raised the human capital of women over a century ago. • Son preference in Hinduism, by reducing the relative value of women, is also a factor that explains Christian advantage. • Results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls and specification tests. This paper studies child health focusing on differences in anthropometric outcomes between Christians and non-Christians in India. The non-Christian group includes Hindus and Muslims. Estimates indicate that young Christian children (ages 0–59 months) are less likely to be stunted as compared to similar aged children of Hindu and Muslim identities. The Christian relative advantage is particularly pronounced for girls. Using representative data on child health outcomes and information on the location of Protestant and Catholic missions, differences in the relative timing of establishment of missions in the same area, political crises that mission-establishing countries were engaged in during India's colonial history, and historical information from the 1901 Census, we find that Christian girls are significantly less likely to be stunted as compared to similarly aged non-Christian girls. We find no relative stunting advantage for Christian boys, which we attribute to son preference and patriarchy among Hindus in particular. An analysis of explanatory mechanisms indicates that elementary and higher education schools, as well as hospitals, pharmacies and print shops associated with the advent of Christianity improved the relative human capital of women with subsequent long-term implications for young Christian girls in India today. Our results survive a series of robustness and specification checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]