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Falling Short of the Zero Hunger Target
While the determinants of declining consumption of overall cereal and food-related items need further investigation, it is useful to understand how undernutrition varies across income quintiles.One Year of CSEP: Essential Reading on Economic Growth and Finance
On the one-year anniversary of CSEP, we bring you eight essential readings on the Indian economy.Are slums more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from Mumbai
India has been highly susceptible to the spread of pandemics. The 1918 pandemic caused devastation across the country, with an excess mortality of 4.5%. While a century has passed since then, the present conditions of dense living and a weak public healthcare system makes the possibility of the rapid spread of the ...The early days of a global pandemic: A timeline of COVID-19 spread and...
The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shockwaves throughout the global economy. Some economies have been affected more severely than others. It started with a few deaths in Wuhan, China, with the earliest reported case on November 17, 2019. By December 31, 2019, when the Chinese authorities first reported it to the World Health ...COVID-19 | Does India have enough doctors? An analysis of growing COVID-19...
Coronavirus cases are quickly increasing across the globe, with just 580 reported cases (on January 22, 2020), in the span of a few weeks, the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases have increased to over half a million across the world. The surge in coronavirus cases has crippled health systems in many ...COVID-19 | Is India’s health infrastructure equipped to handle an...
With growing number of coronavirus cases in India (and worldwide), policymakers have sprung into action – more information is being disseminated about preventive measures such as hand washing and not touching the face. Social distancing has been suggested as a tool to “flatten the curve”, or in other words, prevent the health ...Performance of the Supreme Court and tenure of Chief Justices of India: An...
This is a tentative and an exploratory analysis to assess the productivity of the Supreme Court of India (SC) under different Chief Justices of India (CJI) in terms of accomplished adjudications, which is its core function. In particular, we study the number of judgements passed by the apex court per day during ...Women’s Reservation Bill: What can India learn from other countries?
Globally, women remain vastly underrepresented in local and national politics. As of 2018, according to the Inter Parliamentary Union, only 24%[i] of parliamentarians are women. Can public policy, in general, and affirmative action, in particular, result in political inclusion of women? Data from the International Institute for Democratic and Electoral Assistance, Stockholm ...The persistence of memory: The burden of Alzheimer’s disease in...
Between 2001 and 2011, India’s elderly population increased from 70 million to 104 million (Census estimates). In 2011, the population over 60 years of age comprised 8.6% of the total population. With falling population growth rates this share is only expected to increase further in the coming decades. As the population ages, ...Women’s Political Participation and Development
On July 29th, 2019, Brookings India hosted Sonia Bhalotra for a Development Seminar on Women’s Political Participation and Development. She presented two co-authored papers, “Women Legislators and Economic Performance” (2018)[1] and “Maternal Mortality and Women’s Political Participation” (2018)[2]. The two discussants for the event were Atishi, leader of Aam Aadmi Party and a ...Assessing gender in the North East
On July 19, 2019, Brookings India hosted a Development Seminar on gender in the North East, under its Property Rights Initiative and Gender Secretariat Initiative, which is a platform for developing and discussing research that fuels impact on policy related to gender in India. Patricia Mukhim, veteran journalist and editor of Shillong ...Missing women patients: Gender discrimination in access to healthcare
Gender discrimination in access to healthcare has not been systematically studied in India or many other developing countries. This is primarily due to a lack of reliable data. In this paper, we use extensive data collected on clinical appointments from a large public-funded tertiary care hospital with a robust hospital information system ...Why women candidates are more likely to run as independents
In a democratic polity, political representation is an inherent aspect of political participation. In this view, whether or not women are able to exercise political participation depends, to a large extent, on the terms of their inclusion and the extent to which the rules of the game enable or allow for their ...What India’s 65 million ‘missing women’ mean for the...
As the largest democracy in the world, India has boasted a consistent record of free and fair elections. A democratic government derives its legitimacy and power to implement policy from the “consent of the governed”. But if a significant chunk of the population is “missing”, does it reflect the true consent of ...Teenage girls in India: Aspirations and reality
There are 80 million teenage girls in India. A clear understanding of their current realities and their aspirations is essential in order to design effective policies for them. However, a key impediment for data-driven policy design, in order to address the needs of teenage girls in India, is the absence of any ...Increasing private practitioner engagement with tuberculosis
Tuberculosis is an infectious disease that is most prevalent in South Asia. It is caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis and primarily affects the lungs. A small fraction of infected individuals develop symptoms and the capability of transmission. In 2015, India accounted for 2.2 million of the 9 million tuberculosis cases in ...Using technology to improve the efficacy of school feeding programmes
Heralded as the world’s largest school feeding programme, the Mid-Day Meal Programme in India reaches out to over 120 million children in over 1.26 million schools. State governments, along with funding from the national government, supply free lunches to children in primary and upper primary classes on working days in government schools. ...The ascent of Artificial Intelligence: How will AI change the...
Do machines make mistakes? How often and at what cost? When can we truly trust machines? From SIRI to self-driving cars, Google’s search algorithms to autonomous weapons and drones, the past few decades have witnessed some of the fastest, almost meteoric, rises in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today, as different nation-states make choices ...Artificial intelligence and data analytics in India
Advances in artificial intelligence and data analytics are propelling innovation in many parts of the world.[1] China, for example, has committed $150 billion towards its goal of becoming a world leader by 2030.[2] And while the United States government is investing only $1.1 billion in non-classified AI research, its private sector is ...Brookings India consortium brings together researchers analysing National...
The National Family Health Survey 2015-16 conducted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare provides information at an individual, household, district, state, and country level about various metrics related to health. The survey’s 800,000+ household observations are appropriately weighted by the International Institute of Population Sciences to provide accurate statistics at ...Regulating a Digital Economy: An Indian Perspective
The “fourth industrial revolution” which has been characterised by end-to-end digitalisation has led to unprecedented increases in connectivity and data flows. By 2017, Asia had the largest number of internet users in the world, with 1.9 billion people online. Joshua Meltzer, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, spoke ...Priorities for India’s health policy
India’s health care sector is poised at a crossroads, and the direction taken now will be critical in determining its trajectory for years to come. In a recent Brookings India paper on the Indian government’s health care policy, Shamika Ravi and Rahul Ahluwalia argue that it should prioritize expanding and effectively delivering those aspects ...