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In this paper, the researcher presents the findings of this original qualitative study on the human experience of the participants of The Purkal Project, change-makers in social innovation that provide free, world-class education and vocational development in an economically challenged rural community in the Himalayan region of Northern India. In this paper, the researcher explored the history of the conditions of poverty for women in India, reviewed the development of the Purkal Project, and shared personal perspectives from participants. Societal engagement through family and education are core fundamentals of development and community empowerment; however, social conditions exist which contribute to and perpetuate women's state of poverty in this region. The researcher addressed the unprecedented challenges to the international research process, as well as the effect on the Purkal Project's participants, based on the lockdown conditions created by the COVID-19 global pandemic. An examination of these past and present conditions was essential before presenting the participants' stories to determine their perception regarding social intervention projects, which can have a lasting impact on societal development in rural Northern India. Changes in rural societies must begin with the examination of women's status, which is related to other components of development that benefit children and society, as well as oppositional factors which could impede women's agency. The purpose of this study was to explore the history of the conditions that created and continue to perpetuate the feminization of poverty. The researcher also examined participants' perspective on the effect of the Purkal Project as a social intervention which has developed sustainable methods of poverty alleviation, thereby encouraging agency and empowerment for women and their families in economically challenged rural communities in the Himalayan region of Northern India. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this study was to foster learning through the Multiple Intelligence Approach in achieving educational objectives across the levels of Revised Bloom's Taxonomy. Multiple intelligences approach facilitates ways for students by ensuring that curriculum and instruction validate the strengths and build on the assets that students possess and value them. Teachers encourage students to be independent thinkers and learners, and provide different types of learning experiences so that students discover meaning in content and engage in active learning through a wide range of activities by expanding the gamut of techniques, tools and strategies beyond the typical and predominant ones that are used. This was a quasi-experimental study following the Counter Balanced Design (Two Groups Equivalent Materials Post Test Design), Factorial design to find out the main effect and interaction effect of the variables--levels of achievement, gender and types of school. The sample for the study were 736 students of Grade 6 from four different Boards of school education (SSC,CBSE,ICSE,IGCSE) from 2009/10-2011/12. The findings of the study indicated that: (1) the Multiple Intelligence Approach of curriculum transaction seemed to have an overall positive impact on the learning in realizing the educational objectives among secondary school students, it was effective in transforming as a constructivist learning environment. There was significant main effect as well as interaction effect of the approaches to curriculum transaction Multiple Intelligence Approach (MIA), Traditional Approach (TA) and the Levels of Achievement (Average, Below Average and Above Average) on the achievement of educational objectives of Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT) among secondary school students. There was significant main effect of approaches to curriculum transaction on the achievement of educational objectives of RBT among secondary school students; (2) There was significant main effect on the type of schools on the achievement of educational objectives of RBT among secondary school students; (3) There was no significant interaction effect of approaches to curriculum transaction and on the types of schools on the achievement of educational objectives of RBT among secondary school students. There was significant main effect of approaches to curriculum transaction on the achievement of educational objectives of RBT among secondary school students; (4) There was no significant main effect of gender on the achievement of educational objectives of RBT among secondary school students; and (5) There was no significant interaction effect of approaches to curriculum transaction and gender on the achievement of educational objectives of RBT among secondary school students. Teachers should provide extensive opportunities for guided practice, repetition, and review for their students, giving them ample opportunities to practice before they are given tests or other forms of assessment. Variety of instructional materials can be used during the teaching- learning process to make learning enjoyable and student centered. Teachers need to break down the shackles of rote memorization and invent new pedagogical practices for students welfare. The following are appended: (1) Personal Data Sheet, (2) Multiple Intelligence Tests, (3) Lesson Transcript, (4) Field Notes, (5) List of Teachers, (6) Science Question Paper (Energy), (7) Science Question Paper (Pollution), and (8) List of Experts. Individual chapters contain references.

This paper provides a skeleton of a one-year course in Asian and African civilizations intended for upper school students. The curricular package consists of four parts. The first part deals with the basic shape and content of the course as envisioned. The remaining three parts develop a specific unit on classical India with a series of teacher notes, a set of student readings that can be used according to individual needs, and a prose narrative of content with suggestions for extension and inclusion. (EH)

Community colleges are a large part of the nation's higher education system and provide an important access point to post-secondary education for many students. Transfer to a four-year institution is one of the many functions served by community colleges. Despite the importance of the transfer function, the process of transferring between higher education institutions can be confusing for students. In order to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the transfer process, states have formalized and expanded pre-existing institutional transfer agreements to provide clearer linkages between two-year and four-year institutions of higher education, and many schools also maintain institution-to-institution agreements. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a closer look at institution-to-institution policies, and changes in state policies, respectively. Chapter 1 explores the effects of the transfer admission guarantees (TAG) between California Community Colleges and some University of California (UC) campuses. Specifically, I investigate the impact of TAG policies on transfer to and bachelor's degree completion at UC campuses. These analyses indicate that TAG is positively related to transfer rates and bachelor's degree attainment, but not to the rate at which transfer students graduate. There is no association between TAG policies and the grade point average (GPA) attained by transfer students. Chapter 2 adds to a growing literature examining the relationship between state post-secondary transfer and articulation policies and the final educational attainment of students who begin at public two-year institutions. Researchers have used both the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and various cohorts of the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS). Previous studies use cross-sectional differences in state policies to investigate the effect of such policies on educational outcomes. Most of these studies conclude there is little cross-sectional relationship between state articulation policies and education outcomes such as transfer, credit accumulation, persistence, and degree attainment. In Chapter 2 I build on the existing literature by using multiple cohorts of the BPS, allowing for the examination of changes in state policies over time. I find no evidence of a relationship between state transfer policies and either transfer or degree attainment for beginning public two-year or public four-year students. However, these results are sensitive to the sample used, as well as the policy definition. Chapter 3 contributes to the important but small body of research on the role of private schools in Indian education. It uses a household dataset from India with a rich set of household covariates and student performance data on reading, writing, and mathematics. For both rural and urban India the results from regression analyses indicate that private school students perform better on tests controlling for covariates. In both contexts, however, the private school benefit becomes largely, statistically, insignificant after conducting multivariate analysis on data balanced using the propensity score matching technique. The paper also makes an initial attempt to identify `low-fee' private schools; within the regression framework it finds that children in such schools may perform no better than their public school counterparts. The data and methods used in this paper are not without limitations; however these analyses call into question the claim that private school effect may be unequivocally positive and highlights the potential heterogeneity in private school performance in the Indian context. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Can business play a role in building resilience among vulnerable communities? Can (marketing) employment contribute to resilience - and if so, how? These are increasingly important and relevant questions in our current world as the recent COVID-19 pandemic showed many households to be just one shock away from falling into poverty. Consequently, understanding how resilience, the ability to cope both psychologically and economically with adversity, can be built has become a top priority for many policymakers and practitioners. This paper explores a marketing solution to building resilience. In this paper, we seek to answer the following question: "Can sales employment help people build resilience and enable them to cope with adversity?" We offer a mechanism through which sales improves resilience: by facilitating opportunities to connect. We show that by enabling opportunities to connect with a wide set of individuals, sales employment can build resilience. We differentiate between types of connections and show that different connections can lead to different forms of resilience. We present experimental evidence from a randomized controlled trial involving saleswomen in rural India. With our partner organization, we recruited, trained, and randomly assigned 1,048 women to either treatment, placebo, or control condition. We exogenously assign individuals to an employment position that facilitates opportunities to connect and measure the impact on resilience. In doing so, not only do we vary opportunities to connections, but we also provide a plausible mechanism of why they have more connections than others: certain jobs - in our case sales employment. To the best of our knowledge, there is no empirical evidence showing the impact of (changing) connections on resilience when facing adversity. In doing so, we are the first to randomly assign participants to different employment forms and causally estimate the impact of employment on personal outcomes, such as resilience. Our results show that those engaged in sales employment are more resilient than those in placebo employment or no-employment conditions. In fact, we find that sales employment significantly improves one's ability to be economically resilient when facing adversity by increasing: i) the likelihood of being aware of external sources of help and ii) the ability to take-up external sources of help. Second, our results show that engagement in sales is associated with having a wider set of connections. This effect is largely driven by increased connections with local government representatives and local community leaders. We find a strong association between the width of connections and economic and psychological resilience. Last, we examine heterogeneous effects and find that those from lower caste benefit most from engaging in sales employment in terms of building resilience compared. To the best of our knowledge, no one has looked at the impact of employment on resilience - we show that marketing employment holds the power to improve resilience when facing adversity.

Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240), often called the “Greatest Shaykh,” is the most discussed and debated Sufi master of the late medieval Islamic world. Although many scholars have produced works on his life, ideas, and contemporary reception, few have undertaken the task of tracing the consequences of his work for sovereignty well after the shaykh’s death. This paper argues that Ibn al-‘Arabi’s concepts of the “Oneness of Being,” the “Perfect Man,” and his distinct use of tahqiq (verification, realization) worked in tandem as a subset of ideas beneficial to leaders for establishing absolutist sovereignty in the Mughal and Safavid Empires. This study compares the ideas found in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s works, primarily the Fusus al-Hikam and ‘Anqa’ Mughrib, to the aforementioned, early-modern Islamic governments in order to demonstrate where the shaykh’s philosophy aligns with the crafted personas of charismatic leaders. For secondary sources, this paper references themes found in Kathryn Babayan’s Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs and Azfar Moin’s Millennial Sovereign. Furthermore, the paper is indebted to scholars of Ibn al-‘Arabi such as Henry Corbin and William Chittick. As interest in global studies and the early-modern period continues to grow, the integration, wittingly or otherwise, of Akbarian philosophy into the ethos of sovereignty will continue to be a vibrant area of research. The thought of Ibn al-‘Arabi and his intellectual descendants strongly influenced the absolutist sovereignty of the Mughal and Safavid Empires, the legacy of which reverberates to this day in the cultural memory of the Middle East and South Asia.

Background: In order to protect the poor from health shocks, the Government of India launched Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY) in 2008. The objectives of this study are: a) to assess the changes in the financial burden of health care on the poor population; b) to estimate the effects of RSBY in reducing the financial burden on the poor; and c) to examine the impact of RSBY on the labour supply of the poor. Methods: The study is based on data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). The sample size is between 100-125 thousand households at the all-India level. The study uses pooled cross-section regression analysis to assess the changing pattern of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments on healthcare. The impact of RSBY on financial risk protection and labour force participation rate in India were estimated using the difference-in-differences (DID) method. Findings: My thesis consists of three papers. The findings in the first paper, changing pattern of out-of-pocket payments, reflect that the poorest 20% of households, compared to the richest 20%, realised a slower increase in out-of-pocket as a share of the household’s total expenditure (-0.5%) and catastrophic payments (-2%) during the period of 2000-2012. However, during the same period, Scheduled caste/tribe and Muslim households reported an increased burden of out-of-pocket. The second paper finds reduction in the probability of incurring ‘any inpatient expenditure’ and ‘catastrophic inpatient expenditure’ after RSBY intervention but marginal increase in the ‘per person monthly inpatient expenditure’ and insignificant change in ‘inpatient expenditure as a share of households’ total expenditure’. The effects of the scheme on the total out-of-pocket payment are negligible and non-drug expenditure reflected significant increase. The third paper finds that women’s labour supply increased (3% per annum) but the elderly labour supply declined (1.5%). Further, men switched from self-employment to casual work while women moved to wage-paid regular and casual jobs at the cost of being self-employed. Discussion and conclusion: The poor and other less advantaged population groups realised an increasing OOP burden mainly on account of two factors: i) outpatient care is not covered under RSBY; and ii) the benefit package under the scheme is very modest. Women’s labour supply increased and the elderly labour supply declined in favour of leisure because of possible improvements in health. However, the overall labour supply did not change. The Indian government needs to consider broadening the benefit package and including outpatient coverage under RSBY.

A growing body of literature, particularly from low and middle-income countries, has focused on the role of male involvement in maternal care as a crucial strategy to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes. The purpose of this three-paper dissertation is to add to this evidence base within the context of India, and to gain an in-depth understanding of one aspect of male involvement – that is, male partner attendance in antenatal care. This dissertation utilized data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3, 2005-06 and NFHS-4, 2015-16) and was framed using the Social Ecological Model, Connell’s Theory of Gender and Power and a Gender-Transformative lens. Paper 1 summarized the levels of male partner attendance in antenatal care and assessed changes over time. Further, multivariable logistic regression models were used to examine the factors influencing male partner attendance in antenatal care. The results show an overall increase in male partner attendance in India during the period of 2005-06 to 2015-16, with the Southern region reporting the highest level of male partner attendance in both years. Higher level of education and household wealth, increased knowledge of pregnancy-related complications, older age at marriage, and women’s autonomy were positively associated with male partner attendance in antenatal care. Paper 2 examined the association between male partner attendance in antenatal care and maternal health service utilization. Controlling for all socio-demographic variables and adjusting for report of pregnancy complications, the results showed that women who were accompanied by a male partner for antenatal care reported increased odds of maternal health service utilization (early initiation of antenatal care, frequency of antenatal care contacts and institutional delivery). While the place of residence (rural/urban) did not influence the association between male partner attendance and maternal health service utilization, region had a significant moderating effect. Paper 3 examined the association between antenatal care and infant birth weight, adjusting for gestational age. Further, the analysis also assessed whether the relationship between antenatal care and infant birth weight varied by male partner attendance. Findings indicate that early initiation of antenatal care and maternal immunization was associated with reduced odds of low birth weight among infants. The results showed that male partner attendance in antenatal care did not have a moderating influence. Taken together, the findings of the three papers have implications for policy and practice; further, they provide support for interventions that aim for a more inclusive and gender-transformative approach to maternal and neonatal health.

RESEARCH QUESTION How can the slums of Dharavi be re-developed to maintain the current population density and social and cultural values of the community without a mass displacement of the dwellers? ABSTRACT With minimal means of survival in many Indian villages, rural people have migrated to urban areas in search of new opportunities. From the architectural perspective migration can be explained as a complex and urgent spatial challenge. Cities and their promise of a better life and more opportunities attract migrants, but also force them to take any odd jobs for their survival. Mumbai is being cursed by its development. Migration has forced compactness and high density on certain areas, gradually resulting in the formation of slums. Slums are a pervasive phenomenon throughout developing countries and cannot be separated from the social systems operating within urban life. Some experts claim slums are a disease that grows and multiplies. Although theoretically accepted, rural migrants experience extreme inequality in every aspect of their lives and are often treated as inferior citizens by public institutions such as schools, hospitals and social housing. The aim of this project is to design appropriate, permanent social housing in the slums of Dharavi, a locality in Mumbai, India, near the banks of the river Mithi. This paper will investigate the reasons for urban migration and the formation of slums. The schemes and policies undertaken by the Indian government and other formal bodies will be explained to give an understanding of the legal framework. Sadly, as reported in this paper, the conditions for children living in the slums are pathetic and none of the schemes implemented have significantly improved their overall wellbeing. A brief description of some well-known slums – past and present – provides an overview of slum living conditions and the underlying factors that drive the formation of slums around the world. A comparative investigation of precedent studies is then made to understand what methods and strategies can be used to transform slums into more liveable environments. The conventional approach to developing slums starts with the mass eviction of residents. This is inhumane as it disrupts lives and communities as well as separating people from their means of making a living. The intention of this paper is to offer a solution that does not involve mass displacement of people. The research will identify the needs and demands of rural migrants now living in Dharavi, Mumbai, and the housing solution proposed will consider the social and cultural aspects of the place – for the present and into the future.

Over the last few decades, in many parts of the world, from Mali to Peru, Mozambique to Sri Lanka, Uganda to India, Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) have been employed to foster ‘transparent’, ‘accountable’ and ‘effective’ public bureaucracies. This dissertation asks what do ICTs do even when they do not meet these putative goals? How is the internal infrastructure of governments changing as ICTs encounter the material facets of public bureaucracies? The dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach, marrying ethnography of bureaucratic offices in southern India and archival research of prior programs to technologize public governance in India. It studies what new people, objects and institutions emerge as the materiality of public bureaucracy, historically predicated on paper, is being increasingly supplemented and transformed by new digital media, such as databases, mobile apps and web dashboards, and the political effects of their mediation on bureaucratic power and knowledge.Under the over-arching theoretical frame of techno-politics, this dissertation argues that the digitization of public bureaucracies point not just to the possibilities of improved governance but also its risks, as vulnerabilities and breakdowns in the digital system weaken the “iron cage” of bureaucracy and shift the responsibility of repairing digital records onto individuals. Second, this dissertation makes a call for taking seriously a hybridity of media forms, not simply as a transitory phase before a more stable media sets in, but as the material condition of the state after liberalization. ICTs do not simply dislodge paper documents, but paper seems to be undergoing some change as it encounters, articulates, effaces or is effaced by ICTs. Third, querying the relation between “the technical” as an assemblage of new technologies, people and processes and “the bureaucratic”, this dissertation points to the material and discursive work undertaken to maintain the ever-shifting boundaries between the two, arguing that many expert practices are subsumed under an existing bureaucratic logic of authority and hierarchy. The dissertation concludes by pointing to how these arguments can be brought to bear on the dramatic surge of the digital during the Covid pandemic.

This dissertation examines encounters between humans and snakes from the 1780s to the 1860s, principally focusing upon Britain and British India, to reassess the production and circulation of natural historical knowledge. Serpents were at once familiar and ambiguous in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire, present at every level of society through Scripture, works of natural history, and imperial print culture. They appeared across literary genres - in works of art, as dead specimens in museums, and living attractions in shows and menageries - and their material and figurative presence in London was dependent upon British imperial networks. Snakes loomed disproportionately large in the imperial imaginary, where they were entangled in a discourse of difference. The practices of the natural history of snakes were harnessed to personal ambition and colonial exigencies. By analyzing scientific books and papers, newspapers and periodicals, taxidermy and cartoons, travel accounts, and government archives from Britain and India, this study provides a connected account of how snakes were collected, transported, described, experimented with, and used for a variety of ends. Following an animal around, whether as material, textual, or visual representation, reveals a more comprehensive picture of how people engaged with animals in the nineteenth century, not confined by disciplinary or institutional boundaries at a time when these were being constructed. The cultural and emotive power of snakes makes visible the heterogeneous nature of those contributing to the production of natural historical knowledge. This thesis shows how the moral character of snakes was implicated in how they were encountered and understood by a range of actors, from museum naturalists to imperial agents, and Indian snake-charmers to working-class visitors to the zoo. The chapters examine different but overlapping modes of encounter with snakes: collecting, preserving, and presenting them in museum settings; the imbrication of anthropocentric concerns in attempts to classify and anatomize them; the mechanisms and motivations behind attempts to produce authoritative 'useful knowledge' incorporating vivisectional experiments in the Madras Presidency in the late eighteenth century; Orientalist representations of non-European interactions with snakes in nascent print culture; and the emotional economy of educational displays of living snakes in metropolitan Britain, especially with the emergence of new spaces for natural history, notably the first reptile house at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. The approach brings together insights from from history of science, animal history, and new imperial histories to recover an affective dimension of natural history in imperial encounters.

How do welfare programs shape the economic and political behavior of recipients? This dissertation is a series of three empirical articles that examine the effects of two programs in India. The first paper finds that a subsidized housing program increases the educational attainment and employment prospects of beneficiaries' children. The second finds that this same program increases everyday local level political participation to improve public goods and services. The third paper finds that a national rural employment guarantee decreases participation in state-level elections among the target beneficiary group. Overall, the dissertation finds that welfare programs can alter beneficiaries' economic and political behavior in important and unexpected ways, thereby providing a vast open agenda for future research.

Abstract: This thesis is comprised of two essays on rural villages in India. The following will provide a brief abstract for each of the essays, where one focuses on the women’s power – infrastructure relationship (1) and another on agricultural productivity relative to men (2). (1) Inequality between men and women is pervasive even though gender equality is regarded as a basic human right. Compared to men, the average woman attains lower education, participates less in the formal labour market, receives lower wages, owns fewer resources, and exhibits weaker bargaining positions in household decision-making processes. In India, women and girls frequently face social and structural barriers. Policymakers regularly employ gender-sensitive measure to attempt to close the inequality gap, but such policies are extremely difficult to implement correctly. Rather, the use of gender-neutral interventions such as infrastructure is becoming increasingly more common. Using big data comprised of both primary and secondary data from rural India and a novel econometric approach, this paper seeks to quantify the causal effect of infrastructure development – specifically roads – on women's power (e.g. women's decision making and bargaining power within the household). We use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that exploits program rules from a national rural road program to estimate the effects of the road on an aggregate index of women’s empowerment as well as several disaggregated measures to get at different dimensions of women’s household decision making. We find that women experience an overall drop in decision making power. This result is found to be largely driven by a drop in agricultural decision making (e.g. household production). However, we also observed an increase in decision making power in non-agriculture decision making (e.g. household consumption, labour and financial/ land markets). Overall the shifts may in decision making and power may be a signal of rural transformation. (2) Understanding women’s productivity with respect to agricultural production, frequently requires the use of the collective household model. The collective household model maintains that male and female household members with different preferences maximize household utility and achieve Pareto efficient outcomes through cooperation and bargaining. However, a growing body of literature examining the validity of the Pareto efficiency assumption has found that plots of land managed by women are frequently less productive compared to those farmed by men. The discrepancy in productivity is attributed to differences in the inputs used on male and female-owned plots within the household. Thus, a reallocation of land from women to men (keeping all else constant) could significantly increase total agricultural production. Therefore, scholars have continually sought to explain if women farmers are inherently less productive then men farmers; or if the gender-differentiated profits can be explained by differences in the constraints faced by women– no real answer has been found. This paper examines the issue of women’s agricultural productivity (inefficiencies in yields between women and men-owned plots) using a large and detailed plot-level dataset collected from residents of rural India. We characterize the Pareto (in) efficiency between men and women owned plots in two ways; we study the variation in inefficiencies across observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that women’s ownership negatively impacts yields, but the magnitude of the effect is heavily influenced by observed plot, household and village characteristics. Moreover, when examining variation across the yields distribution (unobserved heterogeneity), we find that women and men owned plots display inequalities in yield. We further this study by also providing fresh insight into the intra-household model assumption of non-separability. Through the methods employed, we find that the assumption may not accurately represent rural households. All in all, our findings support that development policies should go beyond general interventions that fail to recognize gender roles, rather policies may increase effectiveness by exclusively target women. Increasing the productivity of women engaged in agriculture is believed to yield high returns in the form of greater empowerment for women, increased welfare for their households, and increased productivity of the agricultural sector.

India found itself on the brink of economic collapse in early 1991. An emergency loan secured from the International Monetary Fund helped stave off national financial ruin. Terms of the loan agreement required India to liberalize its economy, opening it up for the first time since independence in 1947, to foreign investment. While nationalists were dismayed at the time, there is little dispute that those reforms in the early 1990s spurred India’s rapid economic growth, turning it in to one of the world’s largest economies today. As a result, more Indians than ever before are enjoying middle class lives; with increased access to world class educational opportunities and health services.Yet this growth has in many ways widened the gap between India’s rich and poor. On the other side of this lacuna are hundreds of millions of Indians forced to endure inhumane conditions. For example, nearly 520 million Indians defecate in the open every single day, leading to the spread of fecal contamination. Epidemiological studies have drawn inextricable causal links between open defecation and disease. One gram of feces can contain viral pathogens, bacterial pathogens, protozoan cysts, and helminth eggs, thereby leading to diarrheal disease, the second leading cause of deaths in children under the age of five globally. Fecal contamination can also cause tropical diseases such as trachoma and schistosomiasis. This morbidity has been linked to a reduction in early-life growth, an important marker and predictor of human capital. Similarly, maternal and child health outcomes remain poor. India still accounted for 15% of maternal deaths (45,000) worldwide in 2015. And while India’s under-5 mortality rate now matches the global average (39 deaths per 1,000 live births), its infant mortality rate, 32 deaths per 1,000 live births, is nearly three times the global average. Additionally, the Global Nutrition Report from 2018 highlights the burden of wasting and stunting in children under the age of five in India. According to the report, nearly a third of the world’s 150 million stunted children live in India, and over half of the world’s 50.5 million wasted children live in India. Furthermore, both stunting and wasting are associated with increased mortality, especially for those children who suffer from both. Finally, the National Family Health Survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare found that in 2015-2016, 53% of all Indian women were anemic. Anemia, combined with poor antenatal care, is particularly problematic as it is associated with a higher likelihood of a poor birth outcomes.Paper one is an exploratory paper that qualitatively examines why people in rural Bihar, a state in north India, do not own or use toilets. This paper is rooted in the field of social epidemiology, and as such, seeks to elucidate the possible social determinants of latrine ownership and use in rural India. This paper is guided by the research question: what are people’s lived experiences in trying to build and use latrines in rural Bihar? Overall, we found that not owning a toilet cannot be conflated with a preference for open defecation, the government’s mode of subsidy payment for latrine construction matters, and urban bias – either real or perceived – could be a barrier to improved sanitation outcomes. These findings will help generate new hypotheses that should be tested in future research. Paper two builds on this work by using the the 69th round of the National Sample Survey in India to examine the association between one specific social determinant – the amount of dwelling space owned by households – and the likelihood of latrine ownership. This paper also examines the variation in household latrine ownership that is attributable to village and state context. Findings from this paper suggest that the amount of dwelling space owned by households is significantly associated with their likelihood of latrine ownership. Furthermore, a significant amount of variation in household latrine ownership is attributable to village and state context. Further research is required to elucidate how village and state context is associated with household latrine ownership. Paper three focuses on Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) in India. AWWs are one group of community health workers in India who are responsible for ensuring improved maternal and child health outcomes throughout India. The Ministry of Women and Child Development in India has issued guidelines on the amount of time AWWs are expected to spend on key activities. Given that time spent on activities is an indicator of AWW performance, this paper examines the association between various AWW characteristics and whether or not they spend the expected amount of time on certain activities. Our findings suggest that AWW characteristics such as caste, years of experience, and having a helper are significantly associated with whether or not AWWs spend the required amount of time on home visits, feeding children, preschool education, and filling out their paper registers.

Generations of historians have looked to Bengal, Bombay, and Madras to detect the emergence of the legal and administrative mechanisms that would underpin Britain’s nineteenth-century empire. Yet this focus on ‘British’ India overshadows the very different history of nearly half the Indian subcontinent, which was still ruled by nominally independent monarchs. This dissertation traces the increasingly asymmetrical relationships between the East India Company and neighbouring Indian kingdoms during a period of intensive British imperial expansion, from 1798 to 1818. In so doing, it sheds fresh light on the contested process through which the Company consolidated its political predominance over rival Indian powers, setting a precedent for indirect rule that would inform British policy in Southeast Asia and Africa for years to come. The relationship between the Company and Indian governments was mediated through the figure of the Resident, the Company’s political representative at Indian courts, and the Residents therefore lie at the heart of this dissertation. Given their geographical distance from British administrative centres and their immersion in Indian political culture, the Residents’ experiences can be used to chart the growing pains of an expanding, modernizing empire, and to elucidate the dynamics of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. Based on the letters and papers of the dozen Residents stationed at major Indian courts, this dissertation shows how practical and ideological divisions within the Company regarding the appropriate forms of imperial influence were exacerbated by mutual suspicions resulting from geographical distance and the blurring of personal and public interests in the diplomatic line. This process was further complicated and constrained by the Residents’ reliance on the social and cultural capital of Indian elites and administrators with interests of their own. The Company’s consolidation of political influence at Indian courts was fraught with problems, and the five thematic chapters reflect recurring points of conflict which thread their way through these formative years. These include: the fragility of information networks and the proliferation of rumours; questions about the use of force and the applicability of the law of nations outside Europe; controversies surrounding political pageantry and conspicuous consumption; ambivalent relationships between Residents and their Indian state secretaries; and the Residents’ embroilment in royal family feuds. Ultimately, this dissertation concludes that the imposition of imperial authority at Indian courts was far from smooth, consisting instead of a messy and protracted series of practical experiments based on many competing visions of the ideal forms of influence to be employed in India.

This dissertation examines the interrelationships among health, the environment, and social inequality in India. The first chapter examines the health and human capital consequences of expansions in coal-powered electricity generation in the developing world. Using variation in coal plant capacity within place across cohorts in India, a large coal consumer, I find that children born exposed to a median-sized coal plant are 0.1 standard deviations shorter than unexposed children. Supporting air pollution as a channel, effects are larger among children living closer to coal plants. Changes in coal capacity do not predict changes in other local socio-economic factors, demographics, employment, or infrastructure. Effects are similar by socioeconomic status, but richer households live closer to coal plants. The second chapter, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and co-authored with Payal Hathi and Aashish Gupta, investigates life expectancy differentials along lines of caste, religion, and indigenous identity in India, home to some of the largest populations of marginalized social groups in the world. Using a large, high-quality survey that measured mortality, social group, and economic status, we are the first to estimate and decompose life expectancy differences between higher-caste Hindus, comprising Other Backward Classes and high-caste Hindus, and three of India's most disadvantaged social groups: Adivasis, Dalits, and Muslims. Relative to higher-caste Hindus, Adivasi life expectancy is more than four years lower, Dalit life expectancy is more than three years lower, and Muslim life expectancy is about one year lower. Economic status explains less than half of these gaps. The differences between the life expectancy of higher-caste Hindus and the life expectancies of Adivasis and Dalits are comparable to the Black-White gap in the US in absolute magnitude. The differences are larger in relative terms because overall life expectancy in India is lower. Our findings extend the literature on fundamental causes of global health disparities. Methodologically, we contribute to the literature on mortality estimation and demographic decomposition using survey data from low- and middle-income contexts. The third chapter, published in World Development and co-authored with Aashish Gupta and Nazar Khalid, studies why households are slow to adopt clean cooking fuels in rural north India. Exposure to air pollution from cooking with solid fuels has important consequences for public health. This paper focuses on rural north India, where despite robust economic growth and government subsidies, the vast majority of households mainly use solid fuels. Using new qualitative and quantitative data collected in the context of a policy environment that dramatically expanded ownership of liquid petroleum gas (LPG), we find that patriarchal gender norms and attitudes encourage the use of solid fuels in this region. North Indian society confers low status to women, promotes women’s seclusion, and constrains women’s engagement in economic activities outside of the home. These beliefs encourage women to preserve gas, promote women's work that facilitates the use of solid fuels, and hinder communication between the cook and the decision-maker regarding LPG refills. When rural north Indian households use gas, it is frequently to facilitate the adherence to norms of seclusion that prevent women from leaving the home to collect solid fuels. In addition to expanding access and improving economic conditions, future research and policy interventions should pay careful attention to the gender norms and attitudes that discourage the use of gas.

On 15 August 1947, the British government withdrew from India and partitioned the subcontinent to create two new nation-states: India and Pakistan. The Partition of India and Pakistan has been studied chiefly as a historical phenomenon with legacies that reach into the present. Questions of geography and space are crucial to this history, yet have hitherto received scant attention. This dissertation is a historical geography of Partition that probes the interplay of temporality and spatiality, and the historical and geographical layering, at work in the making of India and Pakistan. It treats Partition as both an event and a process, examining how the 1947 borders were rooted in a set of imaginative geographies and material geographical practices that were fashioned for and applied to the purpose of refashioning territory as part of a transfer of colonial power to independent postcolonial states and the making of new (national, religious) identities. The dissertation teases out the constitutive role of ideals and practices of territorial and cultural imagining, classification, mapping and boundary-making in this historical geography, but also highlights their contingent and contested qualities. It critically analyses and reframes Partition historiography using a range of theoretical literatures (especially critical geographical work on empire and strands of postcolonial and subaltern theory) that foster a sensitivity to the entanglements of power, knowledge, geography, expertise in the context of Partition, and draws on an eclectic range of primary sources, including the hitherto unused papers of the geographer Oskar Spate. Parts I and II trace strands of geographical and cartographic representations of ‘India' and ‘Pakistan' before 1947. Part III examines the geographies and spaces of the Punjab Boundary Commission of July 1947, in which Spate participated as an advisor to the Muslim League. Part IV points to the continued relevance of these geographies of Partition and their critical framing in this dissertation as lines of power.

This thesis investigates the history of the British Legation in Kabul between 1922 and1948. Afghanistan gained independence in 1919 from British suzerainty. The Legation in Kabul was set up in 1922 in recognition of Afghanistan's status as an independent, sovereign and territorial power, which now possessed the right to conduct its own international relations. As the primary conduit of British–Afghan relations until 1948, the Legation was located between Britain's metropolitan and India's colonial and imperial centres. Due to geographical circumstances, India held a high stake in British–Afghan relations until the disappearance of the colonial state in 1947. On paper, the Legation in Kabul was an institution of the British Foreign Office in London. But, the colonial state in India modelled the Legation according to its own ambitions, objectives and experiences. Colonial officers of the Raj staffed the Legation and transferred colonial practices to Kabul. The thesis interrogates the ensuing tensions and ambiguities in British diplomacy in Afghanistan.

This dissertation consists of three independent research papers, tied under a broad research agenda of "human capital" in India. Chapters 1 and 2 are closely related and both utilize a self-collected, primary dataset on the subjective beliefs, of a sample of 12th grade students, regarding factors that may influence their decision to invest in post-secondary education. Chapter 3 examines a different dimension of human capital and investigates the role of agriculture in improving the nutritional status of rural, Indian women. In the first paper, I examine the inaccuracy of students' beliefs regarding the labor market returns (i.e. wage earnings) associated with post-secondary (college) education. Towards this end, I randomize information on measured population wages to a sample of 12th grade students, drawn from schools affiliated with a large public state university in India, who at the time were roughly six months away from making a decision regarding college attendance and college track (technical, academic, vocational) conditional on attendance. I find that, at baseline, students beliefs about population earnings deviate substantially from true earnings in the population. Upon the receipt of potentially new information, students revise beliefs regarding own-wages in the direction of the information, though the average extent of updating is small and masks substantial sub-group heterogeneity. Additionally, subsequent changes in enrollment intentions and intentions to borrow for higher education are in line with both the extent and direction of wage belief updating. A portion of the heterogeneity in wage belief updating can be explained by initial misperceptions regarding population earnings, and baseline relevance of earnings to enrollment intentions. Yet a large portion remains unexplained, consistent with wide heterogeneity in updating heuristics, at the individual level. From a policy standpoint, these findings point to the limited capacity of information campaigns based on population-level aggregates to induce, on average, large changes in individual priors and help to rationalize a number of recent papers that find heterogeneous impacts of information provision on education outcomes. In my second paper, I draw descriptive insights about the extent and implications of the same sample of 12th grade students' misperceptions about post-secondary (college) expenses, elicited 5-9 months prior to them completing high school. Students' subjective beliefs about post-secondary expenses are compared to a reference distribution of actual expenses incurred by students of post-secondary education. Students overestimate expenses for two out of three tracks. I estimate that if students perceived expenses more accurately, then their perceived affordability for technical tracks and general tracks would increase by 10 percentage points and 55 percentage points, respectively. Students' have relatively more accurate beliefs about the expenses associated with their utility maximizing track or their most preferred track, which I estimate using a flexible model of track-choice. Nevertheless, I show that purging cost beliefs of errors, also increases the perceived affordability of students' preferred tracks by an economically and statistically large magnitude. My third paper is co-authored with Dr. Prabhu Pingali. In this paper, we establish a statistically important relationship between household agricultural income and maternal BMI using a five-year panel dataset of agricultural households drawn from 18 villages across five Indian states. Using within household variation over time, we estimate both, the extent to which short-term changes in agricultural income are associated with short-term changes in BMI, and the effect of agricultural income growth on BMI growth over a longer term. Over the longer term, and for the group of households that regularly farm, we find a 10 pp. agriculture income growth to be associated with a 0.15 pp. growth in BMI. Consistent with the literature, this effect is economically modest, but important considering that we do not nd a corresponding effect for growth in non-agricultural income. We present evidence to suggest that the own-production of food is not an important pathway for nutritional improvements, but the agricultural income effect is likely operational through purchase of food, specifically of protein rich pulses. Effects of agricultural income are stronger for younger women, in the age-group 15-25 years, who face a particularly strong nutritional disadvantage in India.

In India, the 1992 Reservation Law and the 2006 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have formalised women as legitimate actors in rural development. These gender-inclusive policies do not necessarily conform to the traditional domestic role of women, which often precludes them from formally engaging in political processes and labour outside the home. In Northern India, these major policy shifts are illustrated in ancient irrigation management systems. With growing rural outmigration and climatic variability aggravating water resources and food security issues, irrigation management is increasingly dependent on the active participation of women. Yet irrigation management is still widely perceived as a male responsibility. This thesis investigates how women adapt and respond to new institutionally mandated responsibilities and expectations as female leaders and as water users. The research is presented in four complementary papers based on quantitative and qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. Three major findings emerged to contribute to theories and evidence of the role of public policies in shaping gendered outcomes for common pool resource management in irrigation system in India. First, gender norms affect women differently depending on their public role in the community. Unlike non-political women, female leaders, as public figures, must secure communal approbation to gain power, credibility, and socio-economic networks. As a result, female leaders shape their political behaviour and policy preferences around local notions of femininity, female morality, and labour-based ideas of expertise. Second, for female water users, gender inclusive policies that legitimise their role as participants in formal political processes and the labour force for irrigation management increase their likelihood to defy gender-based restrictions and engage in formal political processes around irrigation management. Third, providing that formal/legal structures legitimize their actions, women will readily breach gender norms if they are to economically benefit from it. The implication of this research are that policies aimed at providing legal support for women to engage in formal rural development, combined with formalised economic opportunities for women are effective eroding agents of gendered institutions and are catalysts in facilitating the engagement of women in all areas of rural development. Given worldwide concerns over rural development, this study encourages such governmental actions to enable the effective and full engagement of future generations of women in the formal management of common pool resources.

This research examines the ways in which people in Delhi, India learn, talk and think about gender and sexuality in an environment of taboo. Throughout the work, semistructured interviews are analyzed and triangulated with ethnography and media analysis to investigate people's strategies for transforming their own knowledge. Based on the findings, strategies and recommendations for the promotion of health and well-being are made at the end of each paper. Paper one is concerned with how people learn about and achieve access to public health information regarding sexual and reproductive health (SRH), namely contraception and protection from sexually transmitted infection. Paper two considers what and how people learn about sexual coercion and rape, as well as how they learn about sexual pleasure. It examines long standing structures of patriarchy and local political discourse. The Literature about violence against women (VAW), sexual violence and intimate partner violence (IPV) has proliferated in recent decades, with funders recognizing the costs to the health of women and families. However, literature or information about consensual sex, and sexual pleasure for women remains scarce. The device of frames is used to signify how women are shamed by powerful public figures, and the strategies by which they and their allies speak back and create other narratives. Paper three examines the ways in which people learn about and discuss gender norms and sexualities. Deeply held assumptions about gender and sexuality are situated in their social-historical contexts, including the social construction of binary norms governing males and females which ossified in pre-colonial Europe and colluded with local elite Indian patriarchies. Ethnographic material examines how groups of people challenge normative sexual and gender hierarchies. Queer and feminist interests intersect and conflict as they seek to negotiate and live within a hetero-patriarchal hierarchal system. I investigate, through people's narratives and public events, how both women and queer people are compromised in the binary system, and I examine the scholarship of historical roots and erasures. The gendered effects of taboo are examined along with the paradoxes that emerge as different groups seek to work around and live within hostile structures.

This thesis presents an examination of the political ecology of human-elephant relationships in India. Its overall aim is to revitalize the ecology that has been sifted out from the discipline. The thesis draws upon, and consequently develops, more-than-human geography through a sustained engagement of nature-society relations in a non-Western context. The thesis has three broad objectives. First, to examine what more-than-human geography’s emphasis on non-dualistic forms of agency, could contribute to understandings of policy, planning and politics in conservation. Second, to examine the spatial dimensions of human-elephant relations and the social orderings of space which influence these relationships. The third objective of the thesis is to interrogate the politics of elephant conservation through a sustained engagement with diverse modes of human-elephant encounters and the socio-political assemblages with which they are entangled. The thesis first deploys and develops the concept of ‘encounter value’ to account for the different forms of human-elephant encounters and how they contribute to the political economies of biodiversity conservation. The thesis then draws from a multi-sited ethnography examining both encounters and spaces of elephant conservation. It shows how elephants help forge connections across difference and the ways their geographies are reconfigured by global networks of conservation. The third empirical section has an implicit spatial dimension. It is concerned with writing a ‘more-than-human’ geography of landscapes, examining how humans and elephants cohabit with and against the grain of political design. Finally, the thesis examines politics as an ecology of relations, showing how human-elephant relations as well as social and political outcomes may be mediated by materials. Modes of enquiry between these papers overlap. They offer critical insights into three themes that interface between political ecology and more-than-human geography. First, the thesis contributes to conceptualizing modes of human-animal encounters in a symmetrical fashion. It explicates the role of nonhuman agency as an organizing force in political economies of conservation. Second, it posits new understandings of the spaces of animals. This is developed in two ways: landscapes as dwelt, political achievements and as fluid spaces emerging through international networks of environmental governance. Third, the thesis ecologizes politics and goes beyond the humanist frameworks of political ecology. It fosters novel conversations between more-than-human geography and the postcolonial critique of political ecology in the context of human-elephant relationships. Taken together, the thesis offers up a concerted, symmetrical and novel approach to the study people’s relations with animals.

The rights of children to adequate nutrition, good health, and proper development are usually violated, particularly in developing countries, in which undernutrition remains one of the key causes of mortality among under-5 children. The problem is endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia. Among others, inadequate breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices, which collectively are referred to as Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) practices are the causes of undernutrition. In spite of a gradual decline in the burden of child malnutrition in India since 1990 in India, it continues to be the predominant risk factor for child death in the majority of states in India. One of the most effective strategies for ensuring optimal nutrition and preventing under-5 deaths is by adopting recommended IYCF practices. This thesis aims to examine IYCF practices in India. It utilises the World Health Organisation IYCF indicators in conjunction with the 2015-16 India National Family Health Survey (NFHS). As a review to the literature to the study, the thesis first conducts a systematic review to present an understanding of enablers and barriers to appropriate IYCF practices in India, using 2015 Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. This is then followed by examining a regional analysis of the prevalence and factors associated with complementary feeding practices among children aged 6–23 months in India. The thesis then assesses the socio-economic factors associated with IYCF practices in Indian adolescent mothers. Next is carrying out a regional analysis of associations between IYCF practices and child diarrhoea in India. Furthermore, the thesis deals with the role of delayed introduction of complementary foods and community and household factors in assessing stunting and severe stunting among Indian infants. Finally, nutritional policies on IYCF practices in India are presented. Five published papers have been put together to form the core of this thesis.

Sir Nicholas Pumfrey J., in an attempt to guide the judicial mind to segregate obvious patents from nonobvious inventions, noted that: “Both the Scylla of considering nothing obvious except that to which the skilled man is driven and the Charybdis of considering every invention obvious that can be decomposed into a sequence of obvious steps must be avoided.” The task of creating a standard that would serve as a guidepost to avoid the obvious in the quest to glean the invention from the improvement has been tedious and remains ongoing. In this regard, one of the oldest debates for which a solution has eluded policy makers relates to the choice between market reliance versus regulatory reforms. The choice of either option as a tool to address policy concerns presents credible advantages as well as disadvantages. The United States has embraced both of these options to address concerns relating to various aspects of the legal system. This paper contrasts the preference for market forces in the United States to streamline the doctrine of nonobviousness with the preference for regulatory reforms to achieve the same objective in India. In this regard, grant opinions from the Indian patent office – a relatively difficult research tool – have been examined to illustrate the standard and demonstrate the results of regulatory reforms on the quality of patents in India. In doing so, the paper also analyzes the conformity of the standard with the TRIPS Agreement, compares it with the standard in the United States and discusses how regulatory reforms have affected the development of the law on nonobviousness in India.

The paper below largely is an extract of the testimonial filed by the authors to the Secretary of the ITC in response to the Notice on the Federal Register dated August 29, 2013 titled Trade, Investment, and Industrial Policies in India: Effects on the U.S. Economy. Where required, the paper also draws from the written submissions that the authors made to the United States Trade Representative’s (hereinafter, USTR) office on the related question of whether India deny adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights or deny fair and equitable market access to U.S. persons who rely on intellectual property protection. The authors submitted the testimonials to the ITC as well as the USTR and as legal academics with expertise in patent law, trade law, the TRIPS agreement and the law of India. Each of the authors had engaged in this field for more than 10 years and has closely followed the developments within India in relation to the prescriptions of the TRIPS agreement.

Basic service security is inadequate for many urban households situated in urban slums in low and middle income countries. Given the local state’s slow and inadequate efforts to improve service provision, households and collectively-organized resident groups often resort to employing their own strategies to secure services. This study draws on the experience of the collectively-organized Basti Vikas Manch initiative (hereafter BVM, English: Slum Development Network) in four slums in Hyderabad, India. The broad goal of the BVM is to bring about greater transparency and public participation in local government decision-making regarding basic service provision to slums. Although much of the literature on basic service access inequality describes the complete absence or antagonism of the public sector, it is the slow and uneven pace of public improvements relative to needs that motivates slum residents in Hyderabad to engage local agencies to provide better service access. The dissertation takes the form of an introductory essay and three standalone papers. The introductory essay reviews the mechanisms by which inequalities in basic service access degrade quality of life for low-income urban households, explains why basic service is worse in slums, and traces the historical arc of policy responses to substandard service conditions. Using data from a survey of 752 Hyderabadi slum households, and synthesizing the exit-voice-loyalty and collective action frameworks, Paper 1 models household participation in solitary and collective strategies to improve service security. Paper 2 uses data from structured interviews and program files to document the origins of the BVM, the engagement strategies it employs, and the implications of the BVM for other slum upgrading programs. Paper 3 develops a typology which reorients collective service access strategies identified in disparate literatures with reference to the extent of pressure they exert on the local state to improve service provision. This study argues that strategies to change the choice architecture of the state are the most promising to mediate the oft-cited tension between short-term and long-term service needs.

The Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountain range and the Tibetan Plateau birth ten of Asia’s most prominent rivers providing irrigation, energy, and drinking water to over two billion people across several countries today. Therefore, transboundary water sharing is a constant source of conflict for several South Asian countries that rely on rivers to support their primarily agrarian economies.In recent years, climate change has drastically increased global temperatures. As a result, the Indian subcontinent has been plagued with extreme riverine flood and drought events.Climate change-related events like riverine floods and drought, exacerbate the politicization of conflict between nations that share natural resources like water. This politicization is visible in the media coverage of conflict, and the way water-sharing issues are linked with other transboundary conflicts, especially those pertaining to national security. This paper explores the relationship between climate change and water-sharing conflicts in three South Asian nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the national media coverage of transboundary river systems, Indus and Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna, this honors thesis explores how climate change affects the politicization of water-sharing conflicts between these three nations.

This thesis features three closely linked essays in political economy of development. These all share the following aspects: first, they are all set in the Indian state of Bihar: an important, poor, fast-growing state in the north-east of the country; second, they study the role of village-level local government officials in bringing about changes in economically important outcomes; third, they all study the role of caste in mediating change; and fourth, they are econometrically linked in their dependence on regression discontinuity design strategies to establish causal links. Taken together, these essays attempt to shed light on the complex ways in which ethnically marginalized groups negotiate political power. In Chapter 1, we show that ethnic diversity adversely impacts public good provision, disproportionately affecting minority communities. While political representation could mitigate these effects, successful delivery of public goods often depends on how well minority and majority representatives collaborate. Using data from over 100,000 local politicians in India, we show that ethnic differences cause breakdowns in collaboration. We use a regression discontinuity (RD) design to show that delivery of public goods suffers when ethnic minority (low caste) representatives govern under non-minority (non-low caste) representatives. We then study an institutional innovation that can increase collaboration. In our setting, local politicians can issue complaints to the higher bureaucracy under a formal complaints technology. We show that ethnic minority representatives file over twice as many complaints when exogenously paired with non-minority representatives. Does filing complaints improve public good provision? We run a large field experiment involving 1629 minority representatives in which we randomize offers to file complaints on their behalf regarding project implementation. Our intervention increases filing of complaints by 41 p.p and implementation of public works projects by 24\%, accounting for 60\% of the initial gap in provision. Treatment has positive spillovers on neighboring jurisdictions. Our results are consistent with a Nash bargaining model featuring two politicians bargaining over project implementation in a setting with a costly complaints technology. In Chapter 2, we focus on how affirmative action policies affect inequality. We present evidence on the effects of one such policy: mandated ethnic quotas in local government for members from minority groups, also known as ``political reservation". We use two natural experiments and bring to bear multiple datasets from the Indian state of Bihar. These include secondary data on public goods from across 45,000 villages, private assets from over 17 million rural households, political candidacy data from nearly 96,000 local jurisdictions and a primary survey of over 8,000 households. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that political reservation: (a) lowers inequality in access to public goods (b) lowers inter-group private asset inequality modestly in the short-run and more substantially in the medium-run and (c) increases presence of minority-group members in local government in the medium-run (even in the absence of reservation). However, we also provide suggestive evidence of backlash by majority group members against the policy of reservation: using a second natural experiment, we show that an increase in the quantum of reserved jurisdictions in their neighbourhood makes minorities in non-reserved jurisdictions worse off. In Chapter 3, we ask: How do affirmative action policies change the nature of interactions between majority and minority groups? Set in the Indian state of Bihar, this paper presents preliminary evidence on the network impacts of one type of affirmative action policy: ethnic quotas in favour of low-caste members, called ``political reservation". We show that exposure to low caste village heads worsen stereotypes about caste-groups, with low caste members being seen as less trustworthy and more likely to commit fraud. Using census data from over 40,000 households and network data from over 11,000 households, we find that low castes interact more with their own-type in reserved areas. While low caste households report better access to local public goods in the long run, we find limited evidence of other effects on downstream outcomes.

With rapid deployment of reliable mobile data networks and rising smartphone adoption, there is a growing opportunity for digital delivery of agricultural extension services in rural India. This project worked with a company called Cheruvu which began as a provider of soil testing services in Telangana India. Cheruvu has developed a mobile application to convey the results and recommendations based on farmers’ soil tests. Through surveys and interviews with some Cheruvu’s customers, this project will give advice to Cheruvu about their next steps. Results show that the farming information is shared primarily through pre-existing social networks and that it is difficult to introduce other forms of information sharing. The greatest demand for information is related to emergent issues that occurred over the farming season such as pests or disease. The local fertilizer shops dominate as providers of both information and solutions for these emergent issues. According to the interviewees, the biggest barrier for adoption of smartphone applications was lack of education and access to smartphones by the farmers in the household. Our findings suggest that Cheruvu should continue to provide farmers with a paper form to ensure that farmers receive their advice. Cheruvu can also increase adoption at the village level by working with local influencers and offering solutions to problems as they arise during the cropping season.

The first chapter of this dissertation revisits discount rates. In a recent article "On the Timing and Pricing of Dividends", van Binsbergen, Brandt, and Koijen (2012) empirically investigate term structure properties of the equity premium by recovering prices of the short-term component of the market index. Their finding of a downward-sloping term structure of the equity premium contradicts predictions of many leading consumption-based asset pricing theories. In this paper, I provide an alternative explanation and show that the higher average rate of return on the short-term component of the index, as extracted by BBK, is fully explainable by the fact that investors are compensated for the extra tax burden of dividends on the ex-date and does not represent compensation for risk.The second chapter of this dissertation is co-authored with Raymond Fisman and Vikrant Vig and is titled "The Private Returns to Public Office". In this paper, we study the wealth accumulation of Indian state politicians using public disclosures required of all candidates. The annual asset growth of winners is 3-5 percent higher than runners-up, a difference that holds also in a set of close elections. The relative asset growth of winners is greater in more corrupt states and for those holding ministerial positions. These results are consistent with a rent-seeking explanation for the relatively high rate of growth in winners' assets.

Ethnographic representations of the country and the city in India have changed drastically in the last hundred years. Pre-Independence ethnographies of India focused primarily on the village as a self contained and self-sustaining unit, and connections to the outside world were left largely unexamined. With Indian Independence in 1947, the village became a site of rapid change, and the city began to figure as the source of that transformation. Urban-rural interactions became key to understanding the social, economic, and political transformations ethnographers were attempting to explain. In the tradition of Raymond Williams' The Country and the City (1973), this paper explores the emerging relationship between urban and rural India as witnessed through mid-20th century ethnographic representations of village India. In engaging these ethnographies both as sources of empirical evidence and particular forms of knowledge production, this paper gives historical context to conceptualizations of rural and urban India that continue to inform contemporary approaches to issues such as urbanization and rural development.

Globalization presents challenges to emerging economies, as exports from such countries typically consist of standardized outputs. In response, the new orthodoxy of market liberalization shows mixed technological upgrading results because it fails to account for cross-national, let alone, sub-national variations in institutional capacities. Literature highlights the central role of regional (subnational) economies in driving the global economy through productivity and innovation boosts from agglomerative forces. In emerging countries, the effectiveness of regional agglomerations is hampered by the negative impacts of over-urbanization. This problem is worsened in urban-primate settlement patterns involving very large primary cities and no comparable secondary urban areas. Thus, national reforms may have unequal subnational upgrading impacts because of the inter-regional heterogeneity in agglomerative, urbanization and institutional capacities. In this dissertation consisting of three papers, I explore the above issues through the case of India's manufacturing sector in the post-1991 `delicensing' reforms era (1990 to 2005). In the first paper, I construct and employ a unique indicator of technological sophistication to track regional trends in technological upgrading. I find that technological levels for delicensed industries have converged at the state-level but to lower levels of sophistication. In the second paper, I find evidence that falling technological levels coincide with the dispersion of manufacturing activities from urban centers. Urbanization agglomeration economies (variety) are positively correlated with upgrading in conjunction with capital-intensity and imported inputs into production. However, localization agglomeration economies (own industry concentration) are found to have negative impacts on upgrading across the board, pointing to issues pertaining to limited supply of regional infrastructure. In the third paper, I examine the impact of urbanization on agglomeration economies. I find that urban size thresholds - larger to largest urban areas -- play a positive mediating role on the effectiveness of agglomeration economies on upgrading. Further, very large secondary urban areas influence upgrading by attracting skilled migration. In investigating regional political contexts, I find that the reasons why political majorities and lengthy tenures choose growth in secondary urban areas do not associate with upgrading. This may indicate competing policy priorities to the neglect of the manufacturing sector.

Abstract: The impetus for this study came from my clinical practice with burn-injured children in India. Burn injury is one of the most traumatic accidents a child can suffer. Parents are profoundly affected when their child is burn-injured. The number of pediatric burn admissions in low-income countries such as India is higher than in high-income countries with worse burn-related sequelae, including poorer psychosocial outcomes. Family support and a cohesive family environment positively affect long term child outcomes after burn injury. How parents provide this support and related challenges are not well articulated. The aim of this study was to discover the post-hospitalization parenting and/or caregiving processes for families of children in India who have sustained burns. Based on constructivist grounded theory methodology individual and group interviews were conducted with nine mothers, nine fathers, one aunt and three grandmothers of 12 burn-injured children (less than 16 years) who had sustained 20 to 60 % total surface area burns. Open, focused and theoretical coding were used to delineate code categories and concepts. Memos were written to elaborate categories. Further conceptualization and abstraction occurred with constant comparisons of data between and within participants’ accounts. This paper-based dissertation includes an introductory chapter, four publishable papers, and a final general discussion chapter. In the first paper, a comprehensive review of pediatric burn literature on long-term pediatric burn outcomes is presented. The second paper describes one of the substantive processes of parenting burn-injured children: “Embracing the Survival.” The process of embracing involved three stages: suffering the trauma, sustaining the survival, and shielding from stigma. In the third paper another substantive process that occurred in parallel to embracing the survival, “Enduring the Blame” is elaborated. Parents endured the blame they encountered by internalizing, accommodating, adjusting and, anticipating and avoiding blame. The final paper is a critical reflection of the tensions and challenges of generating methodologically rigorous and ethically sound qualitative data in India. Possibilities for dual processes and a theory of parenting are contemplated in the concluding general discussion. The dissertation concludes with implications for practice, research and suggestions for knowledge transfer.

This paper examines Dividing Line (2001), a woodcut print by the contemporary Indian artist Zarina Hashmi, in relation to a history of Partition, the division of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947 that gave rise in part to the Islamic state of Pakistan. An abstracted rendering of the Indo-Pakistani border, Dividing Line, as this paper argues, not only presents an important pathway into the discussions around the place of Partition in the overall analysis of modern and contemporary South Asian art, but also raises significant questions around what the artist or the visual arts can uniquely contribute to the writing and understanding of Partition history in the present, a vexed and fragile historical terrain. This paper posits that Dividing Line can be understood as a historiographical threshold, a space upon which divergent and marginal histories of Partition converge. I argue, more specifically, that Zarina's use of cartography and her tendency towards abstraction in Dividing Line not only exhibits a unique capacity to both recognize and `map' the tensions and contradictions inherent to the historiography of Partition but also enables an endless dialectic around Partition `history' and `memory' through which fixed understandings of Partition can then be challenged and unsettled in powerful and productive ways.

Background: Vaginal discharge syndrome is a clinical condition characterized by leucorrhea, which can be caused by reproductive tract infections (RTIs). Three RTIs are referred to as vaginal infections: bacterial vaginosis (BV), trichomoniasis (TV), and vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC). Vaginal infections are known to increase susceptibility to sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and to be associated with low birth weight and premature birth. The prevalence and incidence of and risk factors for vaginal infections are not well-studied in many settings. Further, the aforementioned consequences of these infections are highly prevalent in many low-income settings, providing ample justification for additional inquiry into the diagnosis and risk factors of these vaginal infections.Methods: The Prerana dataset was collected as part of a prospective cohort study of 898 non-pregnant, reproductive-aged women living in and around Mysore, India between 2005 and 2006. The primary study objective was to evaluate the relationship between abnormal vaginal flora and the incidence of Herpes Simplex Virus - type 2 infection. Participants completed three study visits - conducted at baseline, and at three and six months - each of which involved an interviewer-administered questionnaire in Urdu or Kannada; a pelvic examination; and collection of vaginal and blood specimens for laboratory testing for reproductive tract infections.Analyses investigating separate research aims will be conducted over three papers, as follows: Paper 1: Bacterial vaginosis and risk of Trichomonas vaginalis infection, Paper 2: Epidemiologic features of vulvovaginal candidiasis, and Paper 3: Syndromic diagnosis of vaginal infections using logic regression.Discussion and significance: The Prerana cohort dataset is well-suited to filling in multiple gaps in the research literature. The analyses are among the first to test (or re-test) specific hypotheses concerning vaginal infection using a community-based sample based in a low-income setting. Paper 1 estimates the risk of Trichomonas vaginalis infection associated with the presence of bacterial vaginosis, which fills a conspicuous gap in the research literature. If susceptibility to Trichomonas vaginalis infection is found to be heightened among women with bacterial vaginosis, the burden of sexually transmitted infections attributable to bacterial vaginosis will increase dramatically, given that both conditions are highly prevalent. Next, paper 2 identifies factors associated with increased prevalence of vulvovaginal candidiasis, particularly with respect to the presence of vaginal Lactobacillus. If vulvovaginal candidiasis is associated with decreased presence of Lactobacillus, there will be support for identifying interventions to enhance the presence of Lactobacillus, such as with probiotics, after women are treated with antibiotics. Finally, paper 3 examines the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of vaginal infections in this population using a World Health Organization diagnosis algorithm. Separate syndromic diagnosis models for vaginal infections are developed using logic regression, a machine-learning procedure; the models are evaluated for their diagnostic performance against laboratory-confirmed diagnoses of vaginal infections. Logic regression models offer the potential to improve upon the performance of the WHO algorithm, using parsimonious models which are easy to develop, comprehend, and implement in clinical facilities in low-income settings.

Indoor air pollution (IAP) - predominantly from solid fuel use for cooking - is a global health threat, particularly for women and young children, and one of the leading causes of infant deaths worldwide in developing and emerging countries. This paper estimates the causal effect of cooking fuel choice on infant mortality, focusing on children under 5 years of age, through the channel of IAP in India using National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data during the period 1992-2016. The main empirical framework quantifies how solid cooking fuel, an indirect measure of IAP, affects under-five mortality across all 36 states in the country during this period. To address the potential endogeneity issue in the relationship between type of cooking fuel and mortality, I instrument for cooking fuel choice using forest cover and agricultural land ownership, which induce significant variations in fuel type. The non-IV results show that the use of solid fuel for cooking increases the risk of mortality in children aged under five by 0.8 percentage points, indicating that previous studies over-estimated the marginal impact by about 0.3-0.6 percentage points or 76,000-152,000 deaths per year nationally. Analysis based on IV strategy shows that cooking fuel choice has a significant impact on under-five mortality mainly through its effect on neonatal mortality, and the result is robust to a set of alternative specifications with inclusion of various controls and different estimation methods. I also develop a theoretical model of fuel use to demonstrate how this causal effect of cooking fuel choice on infant mortality can come about.

Protest is a critical political tool for groups without secure access to water resources. The effectiveness of protest is largely dependent on the ability of groups to organize themselves and ensure that they are perceived as legitimate entities. The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which intra-movement groups are organized and how they manage their legitimacy. The case of the Mahanadi River movement in Odisha, India is used to explore questions of identity, legitimacy, and representation in a fractured socio-political movement. Interview and observational data collected over a three-month period were coded for themes. Results show that Mahanadi River movement groups were organized factionally and spatially. Further, Mahanadi River movement groups managed their legitimacy using two related mechanisms: selective identity deployment and tokenism. These findings point to a trend in socio-political movements in which movement groups that are spatially, socially, and politically closer to centers of power tokenize the identities and experiences of their factional counterparts in order to boost their own legitimacy. In doing so, within-movement understandings of legitimacy are re-constructed, resulting in the subversion of tokenized groups’ interests. This process renders protest, a critical political tool, useless to those groups who need it most. This paper concludes by suggesting ways in which the findings may be applied to broader socio-political movement contexts.

Since 1947, India and Pakistan have gone to war four times and faced several other regional crises over the disputed status of Kashmir. Since 1998, the Kashmir conflict has been characterized by increasingly aggressive nuclear rhetoric and signaling. Nuclear use by either India and Pakistan, even for counterforce targeting, would result in the deaths of millions on the continent and forever damage the taboo surrounding nuclear first-use. This paper will explore the ways in which the ongoing Indo-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir may escalate to the nuclear level. I will argue that a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, in reference to the Kashmir conflict, is within the realm of plausibility and therefore deserves careful consideration. I will map out four plausible pathways to nuclear first-use to draw conclusions about what aspects of the Indo-Pakistani relationship are most threatening to regional stability.

The paper examines issues relating to establishing breeders rights in developing nations by taking India as an example. At the outset, the paper examines the international obligations relating to protecting plant breeder’s rights by examining the requirements under Article 27.3 of the TRIPS agreement. In doing so, the paper examines analyzes what amounts to an effective sui generis system as required under TRIPS. Further, the paper analyzes the constituents of the models currently touted by developed nations and outlined under the Union for Plant Variety Protection (UPOV, 1991) to determine the model’s ability to fulfill the TRIPS requirement. In determining the question of whether UPOV embodies the efficiency required to become the sui generis system under TRIPS, the paper examines UPOV’s ability to address unique needs of the developing world. Finally, the paper details the Plant Variety Protection and Farmer’s Rights Act, 2001 of India and compares it with UPOV. The paper concludes that the Indian model is best suited for nations whose objectives for introducing plant breeders rights are not limited to just protecting breeders’ rights but includes biodiversity conservation, farmer’s rights and welfare issues are part of the agenda. The paper's highlight is in: a) discussing, in depth, the constituents of an effective sui generis system. Paul Heald of the University of Georgia has done some work on attempting to appreciate the ramifications of the term effective. Otherwise, there are no other significant contributions to this line of work; b) providing a detailed critical overview of the Indian legislation discussing plant variety protection.

This paper examines how Indian contraception advertising has changed over the last couple of decades, shifting from modest state sponsored family planning campaigns to more risqu? campaigns from private companies in the 1990s. Looking at the KamaSutra brand as my prime example, I argue that these newer advertisements promote male domination of both sex and decisions about contraception. Interlaced with my reading of KamaSutra?s advertisements are data from various public health surveys conducted in the 1990s. These surveys clearly show that Indian women often feel powerless when it comes to decisions about sex and contraception. Given the advertising and the data, I conclude that appealing to men?s sense of aggression and domination is an important part of KamaSutra?s marketing strategy?and one that we see in many other Indian contraception campaigns in the 1990s. In the final section of this paper, I discuss detrimental implications this advertising trend may have on women as citizens and on women?s health and social services.

With globalization and modernization, increasingly people are influenced by multiple cultures. This paper examines the case of two authors, Mark Tully and Ruskin Bond, who were born in India shortly before India's Independence (1947). Both had British parents, but one considers himself Indian while the other has retained his British identity. The focus of this paper is how and why this difference has occurred and how it has influenced their writing. Both Tully and Bond write short stories about India and Indians, particularly the small towns and villages. Their reasons for writing, however, are very different. Tully writes to achieve social change, while Bond writes because he loves to write.

The field of research on gender is expanding with the emergence of new sites of knowledge production. This paper identifies how researchers and practitioners situated in different institutions are informed by different systems of knowledge in their study of gender, and what implications this has on what and how they study and on how these actors work together. Key informant interviews with gender specialists from universities, research organizations, NGOs, UN agencies, donors, and the state in Delhi, India are used as an illustration. Gender-related topics are framed in line with organizational frameworks. These specialists have adopted ‘pragmatic’ ways to bridge epistemological divides between the ‘gender and development’ and ‘feminism’ perspectives. The need for ‘evidence’ plays a critical role in changing expectations of researchers and practitioners in the field. By virtue of specialization, knowledge-producing institutions work interdependently towards the common goal of gender justice.

By conservative census estimates, roughly half of the settlements in India that are urban in nature are governed by rural governance forms instead of urban ones. This paper investigates whether this governance mismatch is associated with the development of settlements. I first empirically explore whether differences exist between rural-governed and urban-governed urban settlements on average, and on finding such differences, I explore the causal effect of urban governance forms, and find that they appear to be broadly associated with better levels of high spillover development indicators. The effect on low spillover development indicators is negative or mixed. The negative association with low spillover indicators need not, however, be indicative of a negative phenomenon for development overall. The results suggest that there is a case to convert rural governance forms in urban settlements to urban governance forms, and I conclude by exploring the political economy of such conversions.

Even though compliance issues are central to taxation policies in emerging economies, convincing empirical research on tax compliance has been scarce. Through the three chapters of my dissertation, I bridge this gap by using detailed value-added tax (VAT) micro-data from Delhi, India.A key advantage of VAT type systems is that they allow for corroboration of transactions using returns of interacting firms. In chapter 1, co-author Aprajit Mahajan and I evaluate the effect of a technology reform that improved the Delhi tax authority’s ability to cross-check buyer reports against seller reports within the VAT system. Before the technology change, such cross-checks could only be accomplished by auditing both parties, a relatively rare and time-consuming activity. After the policy change, the tax authority could (and did) relatively easily cross-check information, declared by buyers with the corresponding information from sellers, directly on its own servers without initiating an audit. We use a difference-in-difference approach to show that the policy had a large and significant effect on wholesalers relative to retailers. A wholesaler is more likely to sell to registered firms whereas a retailer is more likely to sell to final customers where the paper trail breaks down. Therefore, on the output side, the self-enforcing mechanism of the VAT is more likely to break down for retailers compared to wholesalers. We also find significant heterogeneity with almost the entire increase being driven by changes in the behavior of the largest tax-paying firms. This result sheds light on limits of third-party verification in a context with limited audit resources and where the majority of firms do not remit any tax.In low compliance environments, a common strategy to manipulate the third-party verification system is to establish fraudulent (“bogus”) firms. Bogus firms help genuine firms in reducing their tax burden by issuing fake receipts. A tax authority determines the existence of bogus firms by first filtering down based on a few preliminary indicators, and then undertaking physical inspections. Given the authority’s limited resources, these inspections are only done sporadically. A key challenge in improving tax compliance then is to regularly, cheaply and reliably identify such bogus firms. In chapter 2, coauthors Aprajit Mahajan, Ofir Reich and I apply a machine learning classifier to the same tax dataset to identify bogus firms which can be further targeted for physical inspections. We face a nonstandard applied machine learning scenario. First, one-sided labels: firms that are not caught as bogus are of unknown class: bogus or legitimate, and we need to not only use them to train the classifier but also make predictions on them. Second, multiple time-periods: each firm files several periodic VAT returns but its class is fixed so prediction needs to be made at the firm, not firm-period, level. Third, point in time simulation: we estimate the revenue saving potential of our model by simulating the implementation of our system in the past. We do this by rolling back the data to the state of knowledge at a specific time and calculating the revenue impact of acting on our model’s recommendations and catching the bogus firms and estimate US$40 million in recovered revenue.Tax authorities commonly apply size based regulations to firms. If firms are concerned about compliance costs, then such regulations create adverse incentives for firms to stay small. These regulations also increase the monitoring effort needed from tax officials. In the first two years of our dataset, the Delhi tax system had multiple turnover based filing frequency thresholds. Firms with declared turnover (in the previous year) less than Rs. 1 million had to file returns annually, between Rs. 1 and 5 million - semiannually, between Rs. 5 and 50 million - quarterly, and more than Rs. 50 million - monthly. In the years 3, 4 and 5 of our dataset, this turnover based filing policy was first weakened and then completely disbanded. In chapter 3, coauthor Jan Luksic and I first show that this policy resulted in bunching of firms below the thresholds at all levels. Using the change in these reporting policies, we provide further evidence that such sharp bunching indeed occurs due to the VAT reporting frequency thresholds. Second, we calculate the VAT revenue losses due to such bunching and document the longer-term impact of the VAT reporting frequency thresholds. Finally, the subsequent withdrawal of the policy allows us to show that in a regime with size-dependent reporting requirements, more frequent reporting does not lead to greater levels of VAT collection.

The formalization of rural people’s rights to agricultural and forest land is a key policy focus for many developing countries (Larson et al. 2010; Deininger and Hilhorst 2013). These reforms can improve marginalized people’s wellbeing by securing their hold on durable income-yielding assets, especially where land ownership is culturally prized (Holden et al. 2013; Lawry et al. 2014). However, other studies suggest that formalizing de facto land tenure may have negligible or detrimental effects, both economic and subjective (Sjaastad and Cousins 2008; Bose 2011, 2013). India’s Forest Rights Act of 2006 formalizes the rights of indigenous people to the government forestland that they have been using illegally (Government of India 2006). To estimate the results of this major reform, the author and her research assistant conducted 200 household surveys and 42 interviews with indigenous farmers in Gujarat, India. Although the Forest Rights Act is one of the most thorough attempts at forest tenure reform in South Asia, there is little published research on its results. This paper uses regression models complemented by qualitative data to estimate the effects of formal forestland rights on households’ economic outcomes and subjective life satisfaction. Logistic regressions indicate a strong correlation between indigenous households’ land rights and access to government benefits. According to these models, a household with formal land rights was 8.9% more likely to have received a subsidized borewell, and 16.5% more likely have received a home renovation subsidy, than an identical household without rights (p=0.041, p=0.009). There was no significant correlation between formal rights and farm income, rights and food security, nor rights and life satisfaction, perhaps due to pre-existing tenure security or the small amount of land covered by formal rights ii

This dissertation studies decisions pertaining to human capital investment, specifically education and health. Specifically, I examine human capital decisions through two key research questions. One, what is the effect of household structures on decisions pertaining to human capital development of infants? Two, what is the effect of education policies on education choices? Chapter 1 of the dissertation examines the former by assessing the role of grandparents in household decisions, and Chapters 2 and 3 study the latter question using education policies in India and United States, respectively. Chapter 1 studies the role of grandparents in healthcare decisions made for infants. Using a unique research design, I show that a change to household structure caused by the death of the last living grandparent can be used to identify the effect of grandparents on household decisions, if one exploits the variation in the timing of these decisions relative to the death. This chapter highlights the importance of grandparents in household decisions, especially in context of technology diffusion and human capital development. It also makes an important contribution to the literature by offering a novel empirical strategy that could be used to study the effect of family members on a variety of outcomes in an extended household setting. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 investigate how education policies affect educational outcomes of disadvantaged populations. In Chapter 2, I examine the effects of the world's largest free lunch program, the Mid Day Meal Scheme of India. Using an instrumental variable strategy, I explicitly incorporate the differential implementation levels of the policy across states. The findings of this paper show that India's free lunch program increased primary school enrollment in India, especially for girls and other disadvantaged populations. In Chapter 3, I study the effect of education policies on choices of students in higher education. In particular, I explore the impact of a policy change that allowed undocumented immigrants to be eligible for in-state tuition in Texas. Employing a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the reduced college costs resulting from the in-state tuition policy decreased the gap in educational outcomes of undocumented immigrants and their US-born peers. The results of this chapter suggest that the in-state tuition policy increased the probability of graduating and graduating with advanced degrees from community colleges for undocumented immigrants.

This paper explores the future of solar microgrids, as well as potential supporting government policies and structures, by analyzing rural consumers’ willingness to pay for electricity in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The study examines different attributes of electricity, including reliability, power, and price, using choice experiments—a method uniquely able to disaggregate the willingness to pay for each attribute. Household surveys were carried out in 22 villages, spread across 4 districts in the state and covered a total of 216 households. Results indicate that consumer preference for electricity is based most significantly on (in order of strength of preference) power, reliability, and price. Further, despite 9.4 hours of electricity supply per day from the main grid, as compared to an average of only 7.2 hours from microgrids, the respondents exposed to both systems were almost twice as satisfied with the microgrid’s reliability. Based on these findings, the study provides five policy recommendations for strengthening the rural electricity supply sector and enhancing the electricity access in India.

What drives people to sacrifice time and energy to care for unrelated others? Caring in India has special cultural significance, often understood in relation to kinship, systems of reciprocity, and religious service. Based on fieldwork in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) of India during the summer of 2016, this paper investigates the motivations for engaging in care work, as well as the risks and challenges that arise in this work, among two separate groups of care workers: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) workers and sevadars, Sikhs taking part in religiously-grounded selfless service. Through an ethnographic study of the lived experience of care workers, I argue that cultural frameworks, in particular religious ideology and the importance of relationships of attachment, shape the motivation to care, the assessment of challenges associated with the work, and experiences of well-being that are a result of providing care to others. The opportunity to engage in care work creates the potential to fulfill moral obligations and strive towards ethical living. The subjective experiences of care workers, as well as the relationships created through this work, produce conditions that reinforce the continuation of this work and allow individuals to persist through the challenges that often lead to harm and burnout. The psychological processes and obligations that emerge during the process of doing care work recreate a cycle of commitment to ethically care for the self.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) evaluates primary education and children's learning across rural districts of India. ASER is a citizen-engaged evaluation, relying on the participation of roughly 25,000 volunteers and over 500 partner organizations every year. ASER volunteers conduct village asset mapping, government school surveys, and household-based surveys and learning tests, which provide the only annual data on Indian children's basic learning levels. The design and process of ASER directed by its central evaluation question: "Are our children learning?" Because of its household-based approach, capacity-building components, and inclusion of volunteers and partners, ASER represents a unique model for social systems evaluation. My ten-month ethnographic study is the first in-depth research on ASER's design and the only study to date to analyze ASER as an evaluation model. To investigate ASER's design and influence in India and globally, I utilized document analysis, field observations in three states, and drew upon interviews with ASER's architects, funders, staff, volunteers, and partners. Given its geopolitical significance, its population's diversity, and the scale of its civil society and government, India is an important context for research on evaluation—especially with respect to expanding current evaluation theories, which mostly derive from Western contexts and smaller scale evaluations. My findings explain 1) why ASER was developed, 2) how ASER's pioneering methodology was devised, 3) what implications ASER has for India's education system and society, and 4) how ASER's model for evaluation has gained global design influence. There are several ways to understand ASER's significance—the impact of ASER's results on educational policy and governance in India, the influence of ASER participation as a social process involving ordinary people and local institutions, and the popularity of ASER's model for evaluation, which has been borrowed between countries and advocated by multilateral organizations. Utilizing a three-paper structure, this dissertation illuminates ASER's contribution to a culture of evaluation in India by examining ASER's development, design, and process. This study theorizes the connection between evaluation, democratic governance, and citizen participation in the improvement of India's rural primary education system and specifically, of children's learning across the country.

Assessing the climate-change implications and burden-of-disease contributions from solid-fuel burning relies on robust estimates of emissions. Laboratory measurements of solid-fuel burning in ‘improved’ cookstoves are utilized to predict their emissions and effects on both climate and human health, although in-field measurements have been shown to differ from laboratory measurements. This paper presents in-home measurements of one ‘improved’ cookstove – the Philips forced-draft advanced combustion stove – alongside measurements of traditional cookstoves in Haryana, India. When compared to traditional cookstoves, the Philips stove produced less fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and organic carbon per kilogram of dry fuel (p-values = 0.039 and 0.033 respectively), and burned less fuel (p-value = 0.011) and emitted less carbon monoxide, PM2.5, and organic carbon (p-values = 0.003, 0.030, and 0.038 respectively) per minute. Increases in fine particulate matter and organic carbon for dung-burning cookstoves, seen in laboratory measurements from Haryana, were not observed for Philips stoves. The traditional cookstoves, and the Philips stove, all fail to meet the World Health Organization cookstove particulate emission-rate targets, with the geometric mean of the Philips stoves being, on average, a factor of approximately 30 too polluting, and the traditional stoves >100, for indoor stoves. Reductions in emission rates were not well typified by laboratory water boiling tests (WBTs) and in-field fuel consumption rates differed greatly from the WBT. WBTs of dung and wood underestimated particulate emission factors from traditional cookstoves by factors of 2.4-6.0 for the Chula, depending upon fuel type, and by a factor of 23.1 for the Haro/Angithi stoves.