Author Archives: admin

During a survey operation, we conduct various surveys with our study participants, such as Household surveys, Vendor surveys, Market surveys and so on. Something we don’t think about however is that while surveying, the field staff, especially the surveyors take various … Read More

Effective identification of the poor continues to be a problem Identification of the poor has always been more easily said than done. Many people consider the poverty line to be 1.25 USD per day, but can such an amount universally … Read More

There has been a lot in the news lately about financial inclusion and extending banking services to the poor. With the expansion of the Aadhaar registration and new initiatives like the Financial Access at Birth (FAB), it seems that a … Read More

A cutting edge geographic information system tool to track the Indian diaspora has been developed by Dr. Tsukasa Mizushima, a professor at Tokyo University. Dr. Mizushima and his colleagues have developed the “India Place Finder“, a web-based application that allows … Read More

Even in an environment of great expectations, new RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan’s opening statementwas remarkable for its ambition and clarity of purpose.  His speech deserves the widespread praise it has received.  It should also be lauded for its unexpected and … Read More

In our previous post we spoke about why Indians buy gold. Citing another important finding from our gold-loan study, we highlight the various purposes for acquiring gold loans in this post. According to the revised norms of Microfinance Institutions (Development … Read More

We present a guest-post from our intern, Brian Goggin. Brian is a senior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service studying international economics and development. His research interests lie in the relationship between democratic institutions and government development expenditures, with a … Read More

“The Business Correspondent model is a failure” – seems to be a popular statement to make in the development sector these days. The statement reflects the on-going criticism that the success of the BC model is hindered by various constraints … Read More

What is process evaluation? The purpose of Process Evaluation is to assess whether the implementation of the process in a project, is in accordance with the overall project objectives and project plan. PE analysis assesses the strength and structure of; … Read More