The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Melbourne organised an in-person event to launch their report, Health Seeking Pathways in Four Indian States (4IS) Study, at NCAER, on 27 September 2023.
At this event, the team members shared findings from their recently concluded study that help shed light on the questions of out-of-pocket spending, catastrophic health expenditure and distress financing, treatment pathways in four States of India—Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Punjab. The rationale for the selection of these States was to better understand the differences between health seeking behaviour in more and less developed health systems at the State level in India, and to sharpen hypotheses about the evolution of health seeking behaviour as health systems develop effectively. The analysis in the study provides a baseline for health system interventions yet to be introduced, which seek to strengthen elements such as public primary care.
The multi-method study was a collaboration between Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne, the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India, and Population Council, India. The study delves into the following questions:
- What factors are associated with: (a) the decision to use medical care, and (b) the choice among available medical providers?
- What are the health expenditure consequences of both decisions, and with respect to Catastrophic and Impoverishing Health Expenditures?
- What are the earnings-related (pertaining to wages and other sources of income of households) consequences of both decisions?
- What are the patterns of resort (what are the common pathways between healthcare providers and provider type, including primary and higher levels; public and private; qualified and unqualified) in relation to a chronic condition common among adults, an acute condition common among children, and gynaecological problems among women?
Following are details of the study team members who made presentations at the event and the discussants who shared their comments on the study report and the presentations at the event.
Presenters
Discussants
Sajjan Singh Yadav is an officer of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), with thirty years of experience in senior positions in the federal government and six state governments. He has a keen interest in health systems, health policy, and extensive experience of policy formulation and implementation in health, water, sanitation, food and nutrition, finance, and urban development. Between 2010 and 2012, he served as the Director, National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, and headed the policy division of NRHM. He has served as Secretary, Health and Family Welfare, Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli; as Mission Director, National Nutrition Mission, Government of India; and as Secretary to the Chief Minister, Delhi: as in-charge of Health Department in the Chief Minister’s office. He holds a DrPH from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London.
Rama Baru is a Professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She has served on the Technical Appraisal Committee for Health Technology Assessment; the Department of Health Research, the Ministry of Health, the Government of India; and the Scientific Advisory Group, Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi. Her major areas of research interest include commercialisation of health services, infectious diseases, comparative health systems and health inequalities. She is the author of four books: Private Health Care in India: Social Characteristics and Trends (1998); School Health Services in India: The Social and Economic Contexts (2008); and Medical Insurance Schemes for the Poor: Who Benefits (2015). Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume titled Global Health Governance and Commercialisation in India: Actors, Institutions and the Dialectics of Global and Local (2018). She has also contributed to many edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals.
ent and Unemployment Statistics: Issues and Challenges’ by Dr Gurucharan Manna, Senior Adviser, at NCAER, on 6 September 2023, as part of its Dialogue Room Seminar Series. Details of the paper Abstract and the panellists at the seminar are given below.
Gurucharan Manna is a Senior Adviser at NCAER. He was the Director General of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) in the Government of India. Dr Manna has nearly 40 years of specialized experience in sample design, estimation procedures for household and establishment surveys, and the design of survey questionnaires and related documents for fieldwork and data validation. Over the years, his responsibilities at NSSO/CSO have included the compilation of GDP estimates; conduct of the 6th Economic Census; technical coordination and supervision of the Annual Survey of Industries, Energy Statistics, and Infrastructure Statistics; compilation of the Index of Industrial Production and the Index of Service Production; finalization of survey methodologies and reports for NSSO socio-economic surveys; and compilation of foreign trade statistics. He is currently the Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board of Sarvekshana – a half-yearly journal being brought out by NSSO, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. He is also a member of the Reconstituted Expert Group on Minimum Wages and National Floor Wages constituted by the Ministry of Labour and Employment and of the Labour Bureau’s Expert Group for All-India Surveys.
Ravi Srivastava is currently Director, Centre for Employment Studies, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi. He was earlier Professor of Economics and Chairperson, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and full-time Member (2006-09) of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), in the rank of Secretary, Government of India. His main areas of research and publication include labour and employment, migration, social protection, agriculture, rural development and rural poverty, the informal sector, regional development, decentralisation, human development, and land reforms. He is a recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including the Commonwealth and the Fulbright Fellowship; the University Grants Commission’s award in Economics (2001) for innovative research on poverty; and the V.V. Giri Memorial Award (2009) for research on labour migration. He has performed consultancy and advisory roles for the Planning Commission, Ministries of the Government of India, State governments, and international agencies such as the World Bank, ILO, ADB, UNDP, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNFPA, IFAD, and FAO, among others. He is past President of the Indian Society of Labour Economics and current President of the UP and Uttarakhand Economics Association.
Arup Mitra is a Professor at the South Asian University (SAU), Delhi. Before joining SAU, he was Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. He has also served as the Director General of the National Institute of Labour Economics Research and Development, Government of India. His research interests include development economics, urban issues, labour and welfare, corruption, industrial growth and productivity, the services sector, and gender inequality. He has been a consultant to a number of international organisations and was a senior researcher at ILO, Geneva. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan, and Visiting Professor at Nagoya University, Japan. He was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Gold Medal by the Indian Econometric Society for his outstanding contribution to quantitative economics. He has a PhD from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, and a post-doctorate degree from Northwestern University (USA).
Pallavi Choudhuri is a Senior Fellow at the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). Her primary research interests include development, employment, inequality, and gender. At NDIC, her recent work has focused on leading experiments related to measurement gaps in income and consumption data, and women’s time use data. Prior to joining NCAER, she taught courses in Economics at the Grand Valley State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She has a PhD in Economics from the University of Wyoming.
Suresh Chand Aggarwal is Visiting Professor at Institute for Human Development, New Delhi. Prior to this, he was Head of the Department of Business Economics, University of Delhi, till his retirement in 2017. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Department of Business Economics, Indian Council of Social Science Research. He has been an external Consultant to the Reserve Bank of India, Indian Council of Research on International Economic Relations, World Bank, and International Labour Organization. He has guided a number of PhD and MPhil students, and has published four books and more than 50 research papers, mostly on subjects related to labour, industry, and inclusive growth. He has also helped in the development of e-content for post-graduate courses in Business Economics under the E-PG pathshala by the University Grants Commission.
On its seventh Foundation Day, the Investor Education and Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA), in collaboration with the Institute of Company Secretaries in India (ICSI) and National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), held a conference on “Understanding the Psychology of Scams: How to Avoid Fraudulent Schemes”, at New Delhi, on 5 September 2023.
The IEPFA Chair Professor at NCAER, Dr C.S. Mohapatra moderated the technical session at the Conference, on ‘Understanding the Psychology of Scams: How to Avoid Fraudulent Schemes’. The panellists at the session included Mr Ajay Tyagi, former SEBI Chairman, Dr M.S. Sahoo, former IBBI Chairman and former SEBI member, Mr Dhirendra Kumar, CEO of Value Research, and Ms Suchitra Maurya, Banking Ombudsman, Delhi, Reserve Bank of India.
The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) organised an in-person event to launch its pioneering report, Socio-economic impact assessment of food delivery platform workers, on August 28.
The objective of the report was to conduct a socio-economic impact assessment of food delivery platform workers. The issue of platform workers, especially those engaged in food delivery, has been the subject of extensive debate, especially with regard to their incomes, work conditions, work status, social security, and health insurance, among other things. This report is a contribution to both the literature and policy-making about food delivery platform workers in India.
This disconnect was largely due to the unavailability of adequate data on internal migration, resulting in a weak policy response when the pandemic struck. Internal migration is likely to gain more significance as India experiences heterogeneous demographic transformation, with the growing economies of the southern States increasingly relying on migrants from North India to augment their aging workforce. The absence of data and inconsistent definitions of migration hamper policymaking in diverse arenas, including social protection, education, and health.
In this context, following are some of the questions that were addressed by the panellists: Can we begin to define different types of internal migration? What would it take to improve the existing data collection mechanisms to better capture migration flows? What would new data systems look like? How would measurement differ for migrant men and women?
Sonalde Desai is a Professor at NCAER with a joint appointment as Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). She is an internationally known demographer whose work deals primarily with human development in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. She leads the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), India’s only nationally representative panel study spanning two decades.
Reshma Roshania is an Associate Fellow at NCAER. Her research interests include nutrition, food policy, migration, and gender. She completed her PhD in Nutrition and Health Sciences in 2021 from Emory University, where she studied food environments and nutrition status among circular migrant families in Bihar. She has worked in global health and development for close to ten years, specialising in evaluation and research with various organisations including PATH, International Center for Research on Women, Save the Children, and International Medical Corps.
Chinmay Tumbe is passionate about migration, cities and history, and is currently a faculty member in the Economics Area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA). An alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science; the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore; Ruia College, Mumbai; and Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle; he has been a faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. He was a 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, and the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School, Boston. His first book, India Moving: A History of Migration, was published in 2018 and second book The Age of Pandemics, 1817-1920: How They Shaped India and the World, was published in 2020. He is a member of The Lancet COVID-19 India Taskforce and was a member of the Working Group on Migration of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation in 2016-17. He has published widely in leading journals and newspapers and helped set up the IIMA Archives.
Neetha N. is Professor at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), New Delhi. Prior to joining CWDS in 2006, she was Associate Fellow and Coordinator, Centre for Gender and Labour at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, NOIDA. Her research focuses on women’s employment, women workers in the informal sector, domestic workers, unpaid domestic and care work, female labour migration, and gender statistics. She has published extensively in national and international books and journals. Her recent edited books are ‘Working at Others Homes: The Specifies and Challenges of Paid Domestic Work (Tulika Books, 2018) and Migration, Gender and Care Economy, (with Irudaya Rajan, Routledge, 2019). She was the Co-Chairperson of the Working Group on Women’s Employment set up for the formulation of the current (14th) Five Year Plan of the State Planning Board, Kerala.
Rajni Palriwala retired from the University of Delhi, Delhi School of Economics, as Professor of Sociology, where she also served as Head of the Department and Dean, Social Sciences. She has taught at the University of Delhi; University of Leiden, Netherlands; and SciencesPo, Paris. Her research falls within the broad area of gender relations, covering care and emotion, citizenship and the welfare state, kinship and marriage, dowry, women and work, migration, women’s movements and feminist politics, cross-cultural and comparative studies, and research methodology, though her teaching went beyond these issues. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, she has authored Changing kinship, family, and gender relations in South Asia: Processes, trends and issues (1994) and jointly authored Care, culture and citizenship: Revisiting the politics of welfare in the Netherlands (2005) and Planning families, planning gender: The adverse child sex ratio in selected districts (2008). She has jointly edited Marrying in South Asia: Shifting concepts, changing practices in a globalised world (2013), Marriage, migration, and gender (2008), Shifting circles of support: Contextualising kinship and gender relations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (1996), and Structures and strategies: Women, work and family in Asia (1990).
Chandrasekhar S., an alumnus of Delhi School of Economics and Pennsylvania State University, is Professor at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. He was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal 2016 by The Indian Econometric Society, for outstanding contributions to the field of quantitative economics. He has worked extensively on the issues of urbanisation, labour markets, and internal migration in India.
Mittali Sethi is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 2017 batch, Maharashtra cadre. She has served as the Sub-divisional Magistrate at Melghat in the Amravati district and as CEO, Zilla Parishad (rural local body) in the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. She is currently serving as the Director of VANAMATI, an agricultural research and extension institute. Her areas of interest and work include forest rights and tribal issues, public health, waste, and climate change as it applies to people’s lives, and participatory education-with-love for both children and adults.
Udit Misra is a journalist, and has reported on India’s economy and policy issues for the past two decades. Since 2019, he has been with The Indian Express, for which he writes a weekly explanatory column titled ExplainSpeaking. In 2021, he moderated a series of webinars on India’s internal migrants for the newspaper. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and is a Chevening South Asia Journalism Fellow from the University of Westminster.