INDIA HUMAN DEVELOPMENT SURVEY
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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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The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) continues to engage and inspire researchers throughout the world because of the vast array of data it offers through its spectrum of education, health, economy, family, and gender modules for both urban and rural samples across the country.
In this issue...
1.
FOCUS ON IHDS POSTER AT PAA 2019: IHDS team members Pallavi Choudhuri and Sonalde Desai presented their paper on Resource Dependence and Inter-generational Transmission Effect in poster format at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA), 2019. The paper establishes a key link between women’s household work and their children’s human capital development by showing how a household’s dependence on its women for procuring resources like water and firewood impacts the cognitive development of both boys and girls in the household.
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In their paper on migration and women’s autonomy, Esha Chatterjee and Sonalde Desai explore the determinants of the autonomy of female marriage migrants in the public sphere. They find that the opportunities available to such women are shaped by both their geographical communities and the norms about marriage migration in their communities.
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Media Mentions
4. Recent publications using IHDS
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Research Findings Based on IHDS Data
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IHDS
Poster at PAA, 2019
Resource Dependence and Inter-Generational
Transmission Effect
By Pallavi Choudhuri and Sonalde Desai
The time burden of fetching water and firewood for women is well recognised. However, its impact for investments in children and children’s educational performance has received less attention. Part of the problem lies in difficulties of modelling this relationship since family expenditure decisions are endogenous. Households with higher desire to invest in children’s education may reduce other expenses and invest in purchasing fuel to ensure mothers can spend more time caring for children. Using village level price data to model this endogeneity and using IHDS data from 2011-12, this poster shows that inadequate access to energy resources is likely to dampen cognitive achievement (measured in terms of math test score), total time spent towards studies, and annual expenses on education, reflecting negative substitution effect of mother’s unpaid work share on children’s human capital development.
Holding constant type of school, current standard in school, distance to school, electricity access, share of mother’s time in unpaid work, gender of child, mother’s education, income earned by household members other than the mother, caste and religious groups, type of village, and state fixed effects, boys in households where firewood collection is required have 0.36 probability of being able to carry out at least two digit multiplications (score = 1) vs. 0.41 for families which do not have to collect firewood. Comparable figures for girls are 0.29 vs 0.34. Results show a similar trend for children’s test score for households with and without access to indoor piped water – boys in households that collect water have 0.44 probability of success in Math test versus 0.62 for families with access to piped water. For girls, the comparable figures are 0.37 versus 0.56. Piped water access is driven by exogenous factors, and can largely vary between villages – this is modelled by considering a two-level mixed effects model, with the random effects part of the model capturing village level access to piped water. Figures 1 and 2 below show the probability of being able to carry out at least two-digit multiplication for children in resource disadvantaged families for different shares of the mother’s time in unpaid work.
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Figures 1 and 2.
Cognitive Achievement of Children for Resource Disadvantaged Families
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Pallavi Choudhuri
is a Fellow at NCAER (National Council of Applied Economic Research). Her ongoing research delves into issues related to financial inclusion, development, and gender, using applied micro-econometric tools. Previously at NCAER, she has worked on assessing challenges to skill development and workforce participation as part of the NCAER New Skills At Work India initiative. Currently, she is part of the core research team for the National Data Innovation Centre at NCAER, leading the experiments on Income, Consumption, and Financial Inclusion. Prior to joining NCAER, Pallavi taught courses in Economics and Finance at the Grand Valley State
University as a Visiting Assistant Professor and at the University of Wyoming as a (graduate) Instructor. She has a PhD in Economics from the University of Wyoming and Masters in Economics from Calcutta University.
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Physical versus imagined communities: migration and
women’s autonomy in India
By Esha Chatterjee and Sonalde Desai
This paper examines the extent to which gender norms associated with marriage and kinship patterns play an important role in shaping women’s autonomy. Marriage and kinship patterns vary substantially across different parts of India. Figure 1 shows there is tremendous variation in social norms regarding the permissibility of women marrying within their own natal village across states. This distribution roughly corresponds to gender inequalities documented by a variety of studies. In addition to norms associated with village exogamy, marrying outside one’s own village also forces women to move away from their social networks, and knowledge of local transportation structure, job markets and other opportunities.
Using data from IHDS-II, the paper analyses the consequences of social norms about marriage migration and those associated with actual marriage migration, for women’s autonomy. Women who actually migrated for marriage could belong to communities where village exogamy is required, or to communities where village exogamy is not required. The results show that when it comes to physical autonomy of movement, and political autonomy in the forms of civic participation, social norms about migration play a highly restrictive role. In contrast, when it comes to participation in wage labour, all migrant women are limited, hampered by both social norms and entry into an unfamiliar labour market.
Figure 1.
Percentage distribution of respondents whose communities permit endogamy by state:
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Source
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India Human Development Survey II (2011–12)
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Esha Chatterjee
is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in the fields of demography and gender, work and family. Her past and ongoing projects examine the relationship between women’s employment and education; fertility intentions, behaviour and maternal health, unmet need for contraception, and migration in India. She has worked as a consultant with the World Bank in the summer of 2016. She has obtained an MPhil and Masters in Economics from Jadavpur University.
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IHDS in the News
- Mehta, Anupma. "Now, Fewer Women Voters", The Pioneer, 11 April, 2019. Link
- Almeida, Albertina. “Goa's 'Model Villages' Shouldn't Be a Model for Anything.” The WIRE, 29 April 2019. Link
- Kwatra, Nikita. “The Anatomy of India’s Middle class.” Live Mint, 24 April 2019. Link
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Recent Publications Using IHDS
- Deshpande, Ashwini and Rajesh Ramachandran. 2019. “The 10% Quota, Is Caste Still an Indicator of Backwardness?” Accessed on April 26, 2019. Link
- Mukhopadhyay, Abhiroop and David Garcés Urzainqui. 2018. “The dynamics of spatial and local inequalities in India.” Accessed on April 26, 2019. Link
- Mohammed, Abdul Raheem Shariq. 2018. “Essays on Economic and Demographic Inequality in the United States and India.” The University of Arizona, ProQuest Dissertations Accessed on April 26, 2019. Link
- Dewan, Sabina and Divya Prakash. 2019. “The Evolving Discourse on Job Quality From Normative Frameworks to Measurement Indicators: The Indian Example.” Accessed on April 26, 2019. Link
- Shaffer, P., R. Kanbur, and R. Sandbrook. 2018. “Immiserizing Growth: When Growth Fails the Poor.” Accessed on April 24, 2019. Link
- Goswami, Arti Grover, Denis Medvedev, and Ellen Olafsen. 2019. “High-Growth Firms: Facts, Fiction, and Policy Options for Emerging Economies.” Accessed on April 24, 2019. Link
- Siddique, Zahra. 2019. “Does a fear of violence affect female labour supply in India?”, Accessed on March 6, 2019. Link
- Miller-Tait, Evan J., Sandeep Mohapatra, M.K. (Marty) Luckert, and Brent M. Swallow. 2019. “Processing technologies for undervalued grains in rural India: on target to help the poor?”, Accessed on February 5, 2019. Link
- Adusah-Poku, Frank and Kenji Takeuchi. 2019. “Household energy expenditure in Ghana: A double-hurdle model approach.” Accessed on January 18, 2019. Link
- Luke, Nancy, Kaivan Munshi, Anu Mary Oommen, and Swapnil Singh. 2019. “Economic Development, the Nutrition Trap and Cardiometabolic Disease.” Accessed on January 14, 2019. Link
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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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The IHDS Team members present at PAA Meetings in Austin, TX April 2019:
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