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Request for Student Research Proposals supervised by Faculty Members

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 Seminar China’s Belt and Road Initiative: What will determine its success?

NCAER invited a talk by Dr Paul Gruenwald on “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: What will determine its success?” Gruenwald is Chief Economist at S&P Global Ratings, Singapore. The seminar was attended by NCAER Research team and invited scholars.

In his presentation. Gruenwald discussed China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is an ambitious plan aimed at (re-) connecting the Eurasian subcontinent through infrastructure and industry projects by land and by sea “Silk Roads”. S&P Global sees geopolitical realities as well as energy security as the drivers of BRI, and the initiative as one of the largest venture capital projects in the world, funded by the Chinese government.  The success of the project will depend on whether the recipient countries buy into the initiative, and whether the initial seed money eventually creates economic value and attracts private sector financing.

Paul Gruenwald is the Chief Economist at S&P Global Ratings. Based in Singapore, he leads the economic research agenda and serves as the primary spokesperson on macro-economic matters for the company. Before joining S&P Global Ratings, Paul spent almost five years at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) as the Asia-Pacific Chief Economist. Previously, Paul worked at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for nearly 16 years, where he led the team producing the IMF’s Asian regional outlook reports. He was also the IMF Resident Representative to Hong Kong and Korea, the Deputy Chief of the China Division, and the country desk officer for Australia. He has a PhD in Economics from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics/Mathematics from the University of Texas.

World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise – Presentation at NCAER

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.

Book Launch: Digital Revolutions in Public Finance

NCAER and the International Monetary Fund released a seminal, new IMF book Digital Revolutions in Public Finance, on the reshaping of public finance by digitalization, at the Imperial Hotel, New Delhi on April 4, 2018.

The Government of India taxes and spends through its fiscal policy. The design and implementation of its fiscal policy is fundamentally shaped by the information available to it about its citizens and the economy. This includes taxpayers’ incomes and assets, the identity and circumstances of programme beneficiaries, and the magnitude and timing of all government transactions. By transforming the way in which governments collect, process, and act on information, digitalization is reshaping the design and implementation of fiscal policy globally and in India. The book thus comes at a time when the Government’s Digital India programme is pushing ahead with its vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy.

In introducing the book, Shekhar Shah, Director General of NCAER, said, “This book cannot have come at a more timely moment in the evolution of fiscal policy in India. Digitalization is gathering pace all around us. For example, following demonetization, the Indian Government announced several measures to increase the pace of digitalization in India. Similarly, the introduction of GST in 2017 crucially depends on efficient digitalization, as does the Government’s ambitious Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) scheme. Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital identity program, has enrolled some 1.2 billion Indian residents.”

In his presentation on the key themes in the book, the lead editor, Sanjeev Gupta, Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development and former Deputy Director, IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, pointed out, “Digitalization can allow us to do what we do now, but better. And, perhaps before too long, even design fiscal policy in new ways. Digitalization may facilitate more efficient tax design and dramatically improve the targeting of subsidies.  It can improve the government’s revenues and the impact of what it spends on.”

India’s sheer size means that it represents one of the world’s largest potential digital markets. Prices of mobile services have been falling sharply. TRAI data show that by January 31, 2018, some 1.17 billion Indians had subscribed to mobile services. By that time, India also had 378.1 million broadband subscribers, up from 261 million just a year back and from 1.4 million in March 2006.

Yet despite a widespread perception of India as a leader in digitalization, it has a lot of catch up to do. On the World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index, India ranked 91st among 139 countries in 2016. China ranked 59th, Brazil 72nd, and South Africa 65th. India ranked well on political and regulatory environment (78th), and affordability of digital services (8th), but poorly on other parameters, particularly digital infrastructure and content (114th) (see annex table).

The book contains salient contributions from academic researchers, former government officials and technologists, providing perspectives on how digitalization can revolutionize the design and implementation of fiscal policy—and on the risks and challenges that need to be faced. The book explores the institutional challenges and capacity constraints faced by countries seeking to benefit from the digital revolution. It highlights data privacy, surveillance, and cybersecurity concerns, particularly important in the context of recent high profile episodes of digital identity theft and the exposure of private information, which call for stronger domestic digital infrastructure and greater international cooperation and regulation as information increasingly travels across borders.

The book has a number of informative country studies, including a seminal article by Rathin Roy and Suyash Rai on “Fiscal Policy Consequences of Digitalization and Demonetization in India,” perhaps the only authoritative review to date of the demonetization goal of increasing digitalization in India.

The launch of the book was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Shekhar Shah on the fundamental questions raised in the book as they apply to India. The panelists included Arbind Modi, Member, Central Board of Direct Taxes & Chair of the Arbind Modi Task Force on a new Direct Tax Code; C N Raghupathi, Head, India Business, Infosys; Renuka Sane, Associate Professor, NIPFP; and Sanjeev Gupta.

The Panel Discussion was followed by a keynote address by Shri Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, who spoke about the work being done at NITI on digitalization and improving the functioning of government. He noted that this book would be required reading for those at NITI working on digitalization.

Bringing the evening to a close, Andreas Bauer, the IMF’s Senior Resident Representative in India, said, “Clearly today’s discussion shows that digitalization of public finance holds great promise in India. It can not only help raise more revenues at lower cost but also assist the government in reaching the poor through better targeted programs. This is an area that is deservedly receiving much attention from the authorities.”

Shah added that “NCAER’s work, for example, on the Government of India’s DBT schemes, is showing us the strong and weak links in the chain of digitalization, both at the Centre and in the states. As Nandan Nilekani has said, India will become data rich before it becomes economically rich, the reverse of what most other countries at India’s scale have seen. Managing this reverse sequence to the advantage of each Indian citizen is the challenge.”

 The book can be downloaded free from: http://www.elibrary.imf.org/drpf 

 Annex Table: India’s Ranking on the Global
Networked Readiness Index, 2016
Index and subindices Ranking out of 139 countries
Overall Networked Readiness Index 91
Political and regulatory environment 78
Business and innovation environment 110
Infrastructure and digital content 114
Affordability 8
Skills 101
Individual usage 120
Business usage 75
Government usage 59
Economic impacts 80
Social impacts 69
Source: World Economic Forum, http://reports.weforum.org/global-information-technology-report-2016/economies/#economy=IND

“Kathopakathan” Conversation about Women’s Economic Empowerment

The NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) and Institute for Financial Management Research-India Initiative for What Works (IFMR-IIWW) jointly organised an initiative called Kathopakathan (conversation) on Women’s Economic Empowerment at the Viceregal Hall, The Claridges, New Delhi, on March 24, 2018. NCAER-NDIC seeks to develop innovative approaches to collecting data for development, including data on gender, while IFMR-IIWW focuses on women’s economic empowerment through evaluation, research, and creation of a multi-stakeholder platform for synthesising and leveraging evidence to inform policy. During the conversation, structured and interactive discussions were held on the following two themes surrounding women’s economic empowerment with representatives from the spheres of research, policymaking, and data collection: 

How can policy opportunities enhance women’s economic empowerment through participation in the workforce by countering the constraints faced by them in the labour market? 

Should the nature of data collection change given the evolving nature of work and contextual factors that influence such activities, especially since the available data sets on women’s economic participation like the NSS have apparently not kept pace with far-reaching changes in labour markets?

The first session was inaugurated by Anna Roy, Advisor and Head of the Department, Industry, Data Management and Analysis, NITI Aayog, who highlighted the importance of government and private agencies in collecting, cleansing and streamlining data, as well as upgrading government websites to make them more user-friendly. She said that NITI Aayog would be developing a data portal to consolidate different data sets from both government and private sources. NITI Aayog is also currently partnering with Mckinsey to build a women’s entrepreneurship platform (www.wep.gov.in), which will disseminate information on best business practices and the available Central and state schemes to help conduct research on women entrepreneurs. 

Sonalde Desai, Senior Fellow, NCAER, and Professor, University of Maryland, introduced the workshop agenda and briefly talked about the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), set up by NCAER in collaboration with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan for strengthening India’s data ecosystem for the 21st Century challenges. Initial funding for NDIC is provided by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The primary goals of NDIC are:

  1. To pilot innovative data collection methods and to mainstream successful pilots into larger data collection efforts—data collection innovations will focus both on household surveys and big data, particularly uses of administrative data;
  2. To train a new generation of data scientists through formal and informal training; and
  3. To serve as a resource for diverse stakeholders including government data agencies and ministries.

Sharon Buteau, IFMR LEAD, pointed to the absence of financial platforms and services targeted at women, and to the imperative to distinguish between various kinds of work available for women. She emphasised that the digital transformation currently taking place in India should help connect women entrepreneurs with each other more effectively. The ‘ENGAGE’ platform that is a part of IWWAGE is one such forum that can bring women together and facilitate a discussion on women’s empowerment.

In her presentation on “Future of Work: Opportunities for Women”, Farzana Afridi, Associate Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, and Research Fellow, IZA, outlined the importance of using the life-cycle approach for studying women’s labour/employment in addition to the current static methodology because women face different constraints at different stages of their lives. She also cited data to show the huge gender gap in imparting of skills to girls and boys, and reiterated that most women migrate after marriage, which reduces their access to social networks and kinship. For instance, only 20 per cent of the rural married women in the age group of 15-60 years were reportedly in the labour force as compared to 50 per cent of the rural unmarried women. Several supply side and demand constraints also cause low women’s labour force participation, and need to be tackled urgently.

The second presentation on “Employment Statistics and Their Shortcomings” was made by Radhicka Kapoor, Senior Fellow, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). She identified the various surveys on labour force conducted by the NSS such as household surveys, including the NSS employment and unemployment (organised and unorganised) survey, and the Labour Bureau’s household survey. The enterprise level surveys include the Annual Survey of Industries, the NSS Survey of Unorganised and Non-agricultural Enterprises, the Economic Census, the Quarterly Employment Survey undertaken by the Labour Bureau in eight selected sectors, and the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Census by the Ministry of MSME. These surveys show that data in India is neither comprehensive in coverage nor available on a real-time basis. India’s employment data architecture is thus in a state of transition. 

The presentations were followed by policy perspectives by P.C. Mohanan of the National Statistical Commission and Santhosh Mathew, formerly Joint Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development. They highlighted the need for innovation and more comprehensive research on inclusion of data on women in the national level employment statistics. They also averred that the changing cultural and social milieu needs to be incorporated in the data ecosystem of the country. Better management of data can also help in integrating the younger, more aspirational and more mobile sections among women into the labour market. Finally, it is imperative to promote skilling of the labour force, especially women. 

The discussions at the Kathopakathan event are part of a series of activities to be undertaken by NCAER-NDIC for building research capacity, and promoting innovation and excellence in data collection in the country. 

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