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NCAER receives a Rs. 50 crore gift from Nandan and Rohini Nilekanii

NCAER received a historic Rs 50 crore (about US$ 8.1 million) gift from Nandan M. Nilekani, the President of NCAER’s Governing Body, and Rohini Nilekani on Wednesday, 18 December 2013. The announcement for one of the largest ever private gifts to an independent research organisation in India was made in the presence of members from NCAER’s governing body and staff. The gift will fund additions to NCAER’s endowment, the establishment of a world-class new NCAER India Centre on NCAER’s campus in the heart of New Delhi, and new social research and knowledge capabilities in areas that are of rapidly growing importance for India.

Nandan Nilekani is the President of NCAER’s Governing Body and currently the Chairman of the Unique Identity Authority of India and a co-founder of Infosys, where he was earlier the CEO. Rohini Nilekani is the Founder-Chairperson of Arghyam, a foundation that supports initiatives around the country for safe and sustainable water and sanitation. The support for NCAER reflects Nandan and Rohini Nilekani’s deep and long-standing commitment to supporting evidence-based policymaking in India.

The Nilekanis’ gift comes in the wake of the July 2013 visit to NCAER by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to lay the foundation stone for the new NCAER India Centre. During his visit, Dr Singh noted that “This institution is a great national asset … I must say that with the passage of time, the need for creative, purposeful, applied economic research has not diminished, it has only gone up.” Dr Singh was a member of NCAER’s Governing Body during 1976-1982.

In making the announcement, Nandan Nilekani said, “NCAER is India’s oldest and largest economic research institution—a part of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for the independent institutions that a newly independent India needed. I have been privileged to serve as the President of NCAER’s Governing Body since 2008. From its early days in the 1950s, NCAER’s empirical research and data collection have contributed immensely to economic policy thinking in India. Rohini and I are excited about contributing to a national institution of NCAER’s stature, helping it build further on its durable legacy of almost six decades of service to the nation, and supporting its rejuvenation in ways that will make it even more vibrant.”

The NCAER Governing Body and its Director-General, Dr Shekhar Shah, expressed their deep appreciation for this gift, applauding the underlying spirit of renewing national institutions that are independent, influential, and use timely data and analysis to generate practical insights and guidance for policymakers, citizens, and the media. Drawing on the Prime Minister’s recent remarks at NCAER, Shekhar Shah noted that “India needs institutions like NCAER more than ever before; if this was true in 1956, it is truer today. India is grappling with hard policy choices, challenges of implementation, regulation and governance, an uncertain macroeconomic environment, and global transformation at a pace that is unprecedented. Mapping a sound course through this can make the difference between floundering and flourishing, between attaining India’s vast potential and letting it slip away.”

Commenting further on today’s announcement, Shekhar Shah said, “This gift from the Nilekanis marks a true turning point in India. India’s growing tradition of global philanthropy has recently funded places like Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Oxford, and Brookings, which is wonderful. It is now heartening to see this tradition come home; supporting the renewal of independent, Indian national institutions whose policy research can have multiplier effects for the common good. Over nearly sixty years the promise of NCAER has endured—the promise to ask the right questions, gather good evidence, analyse it, and share the results in influential ways with policymakers and people. Nandan and Rohini’s generous gift to NCAER today, and the high standard it sets, will help renew this promise and fulfil it in new ways.”

The gift is a first step in NCAER’s 2020 Capital Campaign, under development since mid-2012. The Campaign is raising funds for NCAER’s endowment, the NCAER India Centre, and short and longer-term initiatives to grow NCAER’s human, social, systems, and financial capital. NCAER will build new research, data collection, and evaluation capabilities that seek to better understand the massive economic and social transformation underway in India, India’s changing role in the global economy, and their implications for policy.

Malcolm Adiseshaiah Mid-Year Review of the Indian Economy 2013-14, NCAER-IIC

New Delhi, Saturday, 16 November 2013: At a seminar held at the India International Centre, New Delhi today, the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) presented the Mid Year Review of the Economy, 2013-14. The Review covered the performance of the economy during the first half of the current year (April- September 2013-14), and made projections for the year as a whole based on two models, a quarterly model and an annual model. It also included two special papers on ‘Revival of the Mining Sector’ and ‘Natural Gas Pricing and Energy Security’, both issues of critical importance to the economy.

Leapfrogging Methodology & Technology in Household Survey Research: Lessons from the US and India

This research symposium organised by NCAER in collaboration with the Survey Research Centre (SRC) at the University of Michigan initiated discussions on improving the sample survey research and practices relevant for bringing data to inform policy making. The Chairman of the National Statistical Commission, Dr Pronab Sen, participated in the symposium and India’s Chief Statistician, Dr T C A Anant, delivered the opening keynote remarks.

The symposium invited several experts from SRC to talk about some of the profoundly influential, long-term panel surveys that SRC has pioneered, including the well-known US Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. Professor William Axinn spoke the US national Survey of Family Growth, Narayan Sastry on the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics and David Weir on the US health and Retirement Study. Beth – Ellen Pennell from SRC led a session on computer based tools for managing surveys.

The symposium provided an opportunity to compare notes on the Indian experience with surveys, both from NCAER and NSSO. Household and other field surveys have always been one of NCAER’s strengths from its very inception in 1956. More recently, NCAER has mounted the India Human Development Surveys (IHDS-I and II). IHDS-II will be the first national longitudinal panel survey of its kind in India.

Dr Sonalde Desai from NCAER spoke on IHDS-I and II, Amit Mukherjee from IIM-Lucknow on the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure while G C Manna, SCIO on the National Sample Surveys. Finally, a policy roundtable chaired by Dr Shekhar Shah, Director General NCAER discussed the ways to strengthen public policy survey research in India.

The symposium was followed by signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between NCAER and SRC, University of Michigan for collaborative work on survey research.

SRC at Michigan (http://www.src.isr.umich.edu/) is a global leader in interdisciplinary survey-based search and its teaching and training. SRC conducts some of the most widely cited and influential studies in the US. SRC’s long-running surveys, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Monitoring the Future Study, and the Health and Retirement Study, have become national resources for US social research and policy.

Private vs. Government: New Evidence on School Performance and Implications for India’s Right to Education Act

Private schools in rural Andhra Pradesh operate at substantially lower per-child cost than government schools and deliver slightly better learning outcomes, according to results from the Andhra Pradesh School Choice Project, a study designed to measure the educational outcome differences between private schools and government schools. The findings were presented by the study’s author Professor Karthik Muralidharan at a NCAER-hosted lecture chaired by Shekhar Shah, Director-General NCAER, with Guest of Honour Montek Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, and Dr Rukmini Banerji, Director of ASER, providing comments. “This project represents one of the most comprehensive and rigorous studies on school choice and private schooling globally, and has been described as a landmark study that will shape the debate on an important policy question for years to come,” said Shekhar Shah. The study tracked 10,245 children across 180 villages in five Andhra Pradesh districts over four years.

The study finds that private school teachers have lower levels of formal education and training than their government counterparts and earn significantly less (on average less than a sixth of government teacher salaries). But private schools have better measures of teaching effort: lower teacher absence, higher teacher activity, longer school days and less multi-grade teaching. At a substantially lower cost per student (less than a third of per-child government spending), private schools deliver slightly better test score gains, suggesting that private schools could deliver even better education outcomes if they have the same per-child spending as government schools.

The study also reveals important implications for India’s Right to Education Act (RTE). Clause 12 of the RTE mandates 25% reservation in private schools for economically disadvantaged students, which has raised concerns that the influx of these students could have an adverse effect on existing private school students. The study finds no such negative effect. “Clause 12 of the RTE is a rare example of policy that could improve both equity and efficiency. But substantial efforts need to be made to implement this in a transparent and systematic way at all levels,” said Professor Muralidharan. A summary for the lecture can be found here, while the paper can be read here.

Karthik Muralidharan is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a Non-resident Fellow at NCAER. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Junior Affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a Member of the J-PAL network. Karthik has an MPhil from Cambridge and a PhD from Harvard, both in economics.

India in the Asian Century

This exploratory research workshop was built around the question of whether the gap between India and its East Asian  neighbours would be smaller or larger by 2025. It focused on what India must do to o close the gap, and how the expectations of the role of India in this Asian Century can be fulfilled. A key question motivating the workshop was how India will find the jobs for the large  number of young people entering the labour force over the next 20 years.

The distinguised speakers at the  workshop included Shekhar Shah, Rajesh Chadha, Premila Nazareth, Shashanka Bhide, Anil Sharma, NCAER, Arvind Panagariya,Columbia, Wing Thye Woo, University of California, Davis, Ajay Shankar, Nation Manufacturing Competitiveness Council,Wendy Dobson, University of Toronto, Manish Sabharwal, TeamLease, Peter Drysdale, ANU, Sisira Jayasuriya, Monash, Alan Deardorff, Michigan, Rupa Chanda,IIM, Bangalore, Kaliappa Kalirajan, ANU, Rajesh Chakrabarti, ISB, Pramod Kumar,ISEC, and other invited guests.

Shri B J Panda, MP, Lok Sabha delivered a special address on the occassion of  this workshop.

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