Archives: Event

Special 15th Anniversary IPF Event

Reflections: India’s Chief Economic Advisor
in Conversation

Dr Arvind Subramanian

talking to

Prof Karthik Muralidharan
Tata Chancellor’s Endowed Chair, University of California, San Diego
and NCAER

Arvind Subramanian is the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and will be leaving that position soon after nearly four years in the Ministry of Finance. In a glowing tribute, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has written about Subramanian’s tenure, “I will miss his dynamism, energy, intellectual ability, and ideas. He would walk into my room—at times, several times a day—addressing me as ‘Minister’ to give either the good news or otherwise. His departure will be missed by me. But I know that his heart is very much here.”

Subramanian was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC and has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS. Subramanian has been a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Assistant Director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund, and served at the GATT in Geneva during the Uruguay Round.

He is widely acknowledged for his expert knowledge of the economics of India and China. Besides papers in journals and collected works, Subramanian has written a number of books including India’s Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation (2008); Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance (2011); and Who Needs to Open the Capital Account? (2012). He has published in leading magazines and newspapers, including The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has dramatically elevated the analytical quality and presentation of ideas in the four Economic Surveys of the Government of India that he has guided. Arvind received a BA in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi, an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad, and an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford University.

This special event marks the 15th Anniversary of IPF and is part of the annual two-day IPF conference to be held in New Delhi on July 10-11, 2018.

Prior registration is required. For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or 91-11-2345-2722.

About the India Policy Forum: The NCAER India Policy Forum is organised annually in New Delhi and promotes rigorous, world-class, empirical economic research on India with commissioned papers, an annual summer conference leading to an international journal, and the Annual IPF Lecture. The IPF provides a unique combination of intense scholarship and policymaker engagement at its summer conference. As India’s policy challenges become ever more complex, besides original empirical research the IPF now also features expert review articles that define the best available, research-based, policy guidance on issues of topical importance. An international Advisory Panel and an international Research Panel guide the IPF, with many panel members joining the summer conference. The IPF’s current editors are Shekhar Shah (NCAER), Barry Bosworth (Brookings), and Karthik Muralidharan (UC, San Diego). The IPF enters its 15th year in 2018, and for its first decade was a partnership with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

Background 

The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) is India’s oldest and largest independent, non-profit, economic research institute. It does grant-funded research, commissioned studies for governments and industry, and is one of the few think tanks globally that also collect primary data. NCAER with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan, has recently set up a new National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). Initial funding for NDIC is provided by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The main objective of NDIC is to serve as a laboratory for experiments in data collection, interfacing with partners in think tanks, Indian and international universities, and government. NDIC forms an important core of NCAER’s long-standing data collection activities.

Request for Proposal (RFP)

The focus of the RFP is to seek for proposals on methodologies for data collection and analysis across the following domains: gender equity, income from different sources, consumption expenditure, employment and unemployment, financial inclusion, health insurance and health expenditure, and agriculture.

The proposals should focus on innovative ideas to improve data quality on the following aspects:

• Fulfilling data needs and bridging gaps: In the context of the above-mentioned domains, this would entail identifying the key sub-domains that have hitherto received little attention, and developing and evaluating scalable data collection modules.
• Mode of data collection: This would involve experimenting with alternative modes of data collection such as telephone interviews, various computer-assisted methods, and interactive voice response, and comparing these with the traditional methods of data collection in India.
• Questionnaire designing: The main question that needs to be addressed during designing of a questionnaire is: What are the elements of a good questionnaire, and how can these be integrated to elicit accurate responses from the target respondents? In this context, the components that require special attention are framing and wording of the questions, use of open versus closed questions, number of points on rating scales, labelling of the rating scale points, order of response alternatives, use of the ‘don’t know’ response, sequence of the questions, the recall period, and skip patterns, among other things.
• Social desirability bias: Since it has been observed that a significant number of people provide false information to stay within the socially desirable framework than be seen to be part of the socially undesirable one, it is important to identify methods of overcoming this problem in data collection. This phenomenon may also be related to the interviewer characteristics and interviewing techniques, as often people report what they perceive is considered desirable by the interviewer instead of giving an honest response.
• Interview setting: This implies assessment of the interview setting and how it can play a role in improving reporting by the respondents, particularly in the case of questions pertaining to sensitive behaviour (e.g., semi-private setting versus complete privacy).
• Survey implementation: The method of data collection and survey implementation may also affect the quality of data. This necessitates identification of the key elements of survey implementation for enhancing data quality, such as interviewing techniques, developing a feasible field plan, and monitoring and supervision of the fieldwork.

Eligibility

Students pursuing their PhD degree or equivalent in any Indian academic or research institute are eligible to apply. MA and M.Phil. Students are also eligible to apply if strong faculty mentoring is available. We seek proposals from student–faculty teams in order to promote innovations, build skills and foster collaborations between the researchers and senior faculty both during and after the grant implementation phase.

Funding

The Centre will support a budget of up to Rs. 6 lakhs for a period of 12 months. The budget should clearly indicate the actual needs and modes of utilisation of the funding for the proposed project. There is provision for five such grants. Only one grant from each applicant will be considered for funding.

Application Procedure

All applications must be emailed to Arpita Kayal, Programme Manager, NDIC (akayal@ncaer.org), in a single PDF document (with the text in ‘Georgia’ font, point size 12), comprising the following components:

A) The proposal (not longer than four pages of text in single space) on research work falling under the Centre’s focus areas outlined above. The proposal should include the following sections:

1. Project Summary;

2. Specific Aim(s);

3. Research Strategy, which would further specify:

a. Significance

b. Innovation

c. Approach and Implementation Plan, indicating how the proposed questions/innovations will be tested;

4. Expected Outcomes;

5. Potential Challenges and Alternative Strategies;

6. Timeline; and

7. Budget.

(The page limit is inclusive of the first six components delineated above, while additional pages may be used if needed for detailing the budget.)

B) Curriculum Vitae of both the applicant and the respective research guide/faculty member.

C) Support letter from the research guide/faculty member.

Last Date for Submission of Proposals has lapsed

Selection Criteria

The selection of students will be based on the merit of the proposal and the CV of the applicant. Merit of the proposal will be judged based on the following criteria:

• Alignment of the proposal with the RFP focus areas
• Innovativeness in method
• Rigour and feasibility of approach
• Clarity of thought
• Clarity in writing
• Selection will also be guided by the distribution of proposals across various domains and components that determine data quality.

Other Requirements

The student and faculty should first check the institutional policies of their respective universities/institutes regarding such grants before applying.

It is mandatory that the selected students spend some time at NCAER to make themselves familiar with the activities undertaken by the Centre and also to discuss and present their research findings. Optionally, the selected students may wish to spend the entire project period (one year) at NCAER.

At the end of the grant, selected students will have to submit a research/working paper authored by the student. The research/working paper after it has been peer-reviewed, will be uploaded on the NCAER-NDIC website. All research outputs are expected to follow the open access policy of the Gates Foundation.

The selected students and their supervisors will also be encouraged to contribute to the NCAER-NDIC blogs based on their experiences of working on the grant.

NCAER staff had the privilege on April 10 of listening to members of the core team of the 2018 WDR on Learning to Realize Education’s Promise.  At hand were both WDR co-directors, Deon Filmer and Halsey Rogers, and WDR team member & senior economist Tara Beteille. This is the first WDR entirely dedicated to education.  In a far reaching presentation (attached), Filmer and Rogers had three key WDR messages to convey. First, education is not learning. Second, many developing countries are in a learning crisis.  Third, much can be done to climb out of the crisis. The report has been extremely timely: learning, vital to building human capital, has to be the bedrock of almost all the SDGs.

Filmer and Rogers started the discussion with the powerful message that schooling is not the same as learning, illustrating this with telling examples from India (using the ASER results) and South Africa.  But the story is similar across many developing nations. Years of schooling is not the same as learning. What is even more worrying is that the progress made by these countries on standardized tests such as the OECD’s  PISA suggest that if nothing changes, it would take a very long time for these countries to catch up to the OECD averages: in Brazil, for example, it would take 15 years to reach today’s OECD PISA average for math.

They then shared why the WDR 2018 team is persuaded that much of the developing world is in a learning crisis.  And why the learning crisis ends up being a skills crisis. The percentage of kids leaving primary school who meet minimum proficiency thresholds for maths drops off significantly from higher income countries to lower income ones in each of the upper-middle, lower-middle (where India is), and the low income countries.  The learning crisis amplifies inequality. As foundational education remains weak, the learning deficits widen over time resulting in poor skills and employability and incomes. The learning crisis severely hobbles disadvantaged and poor youth who most need the boost that a good education can offer.  In a few years, the learning crisis then transforms into a skill crisis.

But education continues to have great promise.  The WDR shows data demonstrating that what matters for growth is learning. Dean and Halsey talked about the four key issues that impede learning:

1. Unprepared learners (malnutrition, illness, low parental investment, harsh living environments, poverty)
2. Unskilled and unmotivated teachers (weak teacher education, teacher absenteeism)
3. Lack of learning-focused inputs (Inadequate resources, dearth of textbooks, stationery, laptops)
4. Poor management and governance (keeps teacher quality down, no emphasis on learning outcomes, ineffective use of resource, no accountability)

These problems persist and are often compounded by technical complexities in the learning process and political economy that pull education systems out of alignment with learning, and reinforce a low-learning, low-accountability, high-inequality trap.

What can be done? The world has seen substantial success stories in countries such as South Korea, Vietnam, Peru, and in parts of India, experiences that tell us  that rapid progress is possible.

The WDR co-directors emphasize three broad strategies that can encourage corrective action and help redesign policies and implement them:

1. Assess learning—to measure and track learning better through better metrics and to shine a light on the hidden exclusion of learning
2. Act on evidence—to make schools work for all learners, using evidence to guide innovation and practice and motivate both students and teachers
3. Align actors—to make the whole system work for learning. Tackle the technical and political barriers to learning at scale with tools such as information and metrics.

Tara Beteille spoke about the companion report on South Asia that she is leading and which will drill down into the implications of the WDR messages for the region.  She promised to present this new report at NCAER later in the year.
The presentations were followed by a lively and rich exchange and Q&A with NCAER staff. They also talked about how the findings of the WDR 2018 resonated closely with the Skilling India: No time to lose report that NCAER is about to release.
The WDR team and NCAER are likely to partner over the coming months to hold a series of video conferences open to researchers and interested public built around the four parts of the WDR 2018: Education’s promise; The learning crisis; Innovations and evidence in learning; and Making the system work for learning at scale.
Over lunch with the WDR team, further plans were hatched to explore if India’s Right to Education Act should be renamed the Right to Learning Act, and what that would mean for India’s children and teachers and for India’s policymakers and political leaders.