Data for Development
INDIA HUMAN DEVELOPMENT SURVEY
Happy New Year 2020!
January 2020
W elcome to the India Human Development Survey Forum

A monthly update of socio-economic developments in India by the
IHDS research community

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In This Issue...
 
Members of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) team led by Dr. Sonalde Desai use IHDS data to provide an independent assessment of changes in living standards for 4,828 households in the states of Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand during 2011-12 (IHDS-II) and 2017. This IHDS data brief also compares these changes to the changes in living standards between the two waves of IHDS in 2004-05 and 2011-12.

  • Recent publications using IHDS
Research Findings Based on IHDS Data
A Glass Half Full: Changes in Indian Standards of Living since 2012
 
Sonalde Desai, Manjistha Banerji, Debasis Barik, Dinesh Tiwari and Om Prakash Sharma
The National Sample Survey (NSS), the flagship survey providing information on standards of living in India, has recently come under criticism as it chose not to release the results of the 2017-18 NSS Consumption Expenditure Survey. One of the challenges facing the interpretatio n of consumption data over this period is the difficulty in disentangling long-term, secular changes in consumption expenditure from the short-term shock caused by the November 2016 demonetisation, which led to a cash shortage and is believed to have adversely affected the incomes of small businesses, informal workers, and others dependent on cash, and therefore their consumption. In this data brief, the authors use information from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to provide an independent assessment of changes in living standards across the country since the second wave of IHDS in 2011-12. 
These results are based on a sub-round of IHDS (using a scaled down questionnaire) conducted in early 2017 for 4,828 households located in Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttarakhand. The results should be treated with caution due to the small number of households covered and sample selectivity due to attrition. 
Sonalde Desai is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social inequalities in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. She studies inequalities in education, employment and maternal and child health outcomes by locating them within the political economy of the region. While much of her research focuses on South Asia, she has also engaged in comparative studies across Asia, Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa. She has published articles in a wide range of sociological and demographic journals including American Sociological Review, Demography, Population and Development Review and Feminist Studies . Dr. Desai is the Director of the India Human Development Survey.
Manjistha Banerji is a social demographer with areas of research broadly encompassing family demography, social change and gender, migration and the labour market and education and development and survey methods. As a Fellow at NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre, she is working on modules that help capture women’s access to resources in large-scale surveys. She is also part of a migration study that draws upon a unique migration data (2017) tracking migrants and non-migrants from prior two rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS, 2004-05 and 2011-12). Prior to joining NCAER, Manjistha worked with ASER Centre where she co-authored the India Early Childhood Education Impact Study (IECEI).  
Debasis Barik is a Fellow at NCAER. He has been working with the National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) at NCAER and leading an experiment on ‘Improving the Estimates of Out-of-pocket Health Expenditure.’ Prior to joining NDIC, he was an integral part of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) project team. His research revolves around public health, demography, migration, gender, labour, and social security. He is an active member of various national and international organisations, working in areas of demography and social sciences. He is a member of the Expert Group formed by National Health System Resource Centre to institutionalise National Health Accounts estimates. He is also serving as Associate Editor and Review Editor in some reputed international journals. He holds a PhD in Demography from International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai. His dissertation was centred on the health and economic implications of the ageing process among the Indian population. 
Dinesh Tiwari is an Associate Fellow at NCAER. He is an anthropologist with rich experience of conducting large-scale primary household surveys, qualitative interviews, and experimental data collection. He has worked with the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, the World Bank, and the Center de Sciences Humanies, Embassy of France (Palanpur Study) in the past. He is a part of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) team and is currently working on discrepancies in income and consumption expenditure that are reported in IHDS-II. His areas of interest include migration studies, ethnographic research and experimental economics. He has a PhD and MSc in Anthropology from Sagar University. 
Om Prakash Sharma is an Associate Fellow at NCAER, specialising in primary data collection, field management, field training, coding and editing. He is currently the project coordinator for the India Human Development Survey-II. Some of the other studies he has worked on include: “Fertiliser Consumption and Quality Seeds,” “Human Development Profile for India 2004-05”, “Rural Economic and Demographic Change in India” and “The Third Census of Handloom Weavers.” Between 1988 and 2007, he headed the NCAER Field Office at Bhopal, recruiting, training and supervising field staff and editing primary data. He has an MA and BA in Economics from Agra University.  
IHDS in the News
Desai, Sonalde. 2020. “Consumption spending may not have fallen in India: New survey ,” Livemint, January 27. Link
 
Kulkarni, Varsha S. and Raghav Gaiha. 2020. “View: It's time to scrutinise the link between poverty and income inequality.” The Economic Times , January 20. Link

Rukmini, S. “India’s poor are also document-poor.” 2020. Livemint , January 6. Link

Mehta, Anupma. 2020. “In pursuit of gender equality.” The Pioneer , December 30. Link

Misra, Manjima. 2019. “How Is the Agrarian Distress in Maharashtra Affecting Women” CADTM, December 23. Link


Recent Publications Using IHDS

Sedova, Barbora and Matthias Kalkuhl. 2020. “Who are the climate migrants and where do they go? Evidence from rural India,” World Development , Vol. 129, May, 104848, Accessed on January 21, 2020 Link
 
Kumar, Nikhil. 2020. “Reservation Agitations of Agrarians Castes In India; A Historical and Contemporary Analysis,” Our Heritage Journal , 68(1): 1744–1750, Accessed on January 16, 2020 Download Link

Clement, Matthieu, Pierre Levasseur and Suneha Seetahul. 2020. “Is Excess Weight Penalised or Rewarded in Middle ‐ Income Countries’ Labour Markets? Comparative Evidence from China, India and Mexico,” Wiley Online Library ,  
https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12220 , Accessed on January 6, 2020. Link

Ranjan, Rahul and Kausik K. Bhadra. 2019. “Impacts of Traditional Cooking Fuels on the Prevalence of Ailments in India,” Indian Journal of Human Development , 13(3): 294-307, Accessed on January 4, 2020. Link

Desai, Sonalde, Zhiyong Lin, and Feinian Chen. 2019. “The Emergence of Educational Hypogamy in India,” Working Paper No. 2019-2 , India Human Development Survey, National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi, and University of Maryland, College Park, Accessed on December 31, 2019. Link

Jat, Rajveer and Bharat Ramaswami, 2019. “The Vanishing Productivity Gap: The Indian Case,” Paper presented at the 15th Annual Conference on ‘Economic Growth and Development’, December 18-20, 2019, held at Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, Accessed on December 28, 2019. Download Link

Jain, Manisha. 2019. “Do Financial Incentives Affect Fertility and Sex Ratio at Birth? An Impact Evaluation of Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Laxmi Yojana,” Working Paper , University of Wisconsin-Madison, Accessed on December 26, 2019. Link

Goel, Prarthna Agarwal. 2019. “Female Education, Marital Assortative Mating and Dowry: Theory and Evidence from India,” PhD Thesis, Accessed on December 26, 2019. Link

Kumari, Nutan, Chander Shekhar, and Ajay Gupta. 2019. “Women’s Participation in Selecting Spouse and Fertility Preferences in India,” Demography India , 48 (2): 35–47, Accessed on December 24, 2019 Link

Chawla Paramjeet. 2019. “Horizontal Inequality in Urban India: A Human Development Perspective,” Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (RAIS) Conference Proceedings, November 6–7, 2019, Accessed on December 17, 2019. Link

Chakraborty, Shiney and Ruchika Chaudhary. 2019. “Identifying Gaps in Gender Statistics in India,” Working Paper , IWWAGE, Institute for Financial Management and Research, Accessed on December 17, 2019 Link

About IHDS
The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) is a nationally representative, multi-topic survey of 41,554 households in 1503 villages and 971 urban neighbourhoods across India. The first round of interviews was completed in 2004-05; data are publicly available through ICPSR. A second round of IHDS re-interviewed most of these households in 2011-12 (N=42,152) and data for the same can be found here.

IHDS has been jointly organised by researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi. Funding for the second round of this survey is provided by the National Institutes of Health, grants R01HD041455 and R01HD061048. Additional funding is provided by The Ford Foundation, IDRC and DFID.
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