The World Bank’s Development Research Group ‘Global Financial Inclusion Database (Global Findex)’ has recently published its comprehensive report The Global Findex Database 2014: Measuring Financial Inclusion around the World and The 2014 Global Findex database.  Good news is that between 2011 and … Read More

Picture yourself as a working-woman in rural Bihar. Lucky for you, at this time, it’s the three to four months in which you get a daily wage: harvesting season. Unlucky for you, as a Paswan, or Mahadalit, you got the short … Read More

Currently, we are in the baseline phase of data collection for the project- Affordable Day Care to Empower Indian Women. This is an impact evaluation project, which aims to assess the impact of day care centers on women’s economic and … Read More

After having worked in the field for considerable amount of time, I use this space to reflect on what differentiates us and the people we study. I am going to gloss over obvious differences like living standards and instead search … Read More

Skill development has emerged as a key policy priority for India. In this article, Pratibha Joshi examines existing options for understanding skill components of training courses, their shortcomings, and proposes some alternatives. While there has been a massive push for skilling … Read More

Giorgia Barboni is a Principle Investigator on a few IFMR LEAD projects. She was recently in India conducting research work. We took this opportunity to ask her about her research experiences in India and more. According to you, what research … Read More

The building sector accounts for a significant share of energy consumption in India. Thus, policies that encourage energy efficiency in building construction have an important role to play in energy conservation. In this article, authors Sivaramakrishnan Balasubramanian and Gayathri Sivakumar … Read More

“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity”-Michael Porter Any study that evaluates a service/product innovation having a completely new or  modified design, not only assesses the effect of adoption by the community but also studies the process of adoption. … Read More

The Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission aims to make India “open-defecation free” by 2019. While it is a laudable goal, it is worth noting that a variety of government-driven sanitation programmes of the past, which included both subsidies and … Read More

Today, electronic data collection finds application in various walks of life – be it in hospitals, industries, or offices. Since the advent of Open Data Kit (ODK) and Survey CTO,among other software platforms, electronic data collection has drastically changed the … Read More