India has one of the world’s youngest populations and one million job-seekers will join India’s labour force every month for the next 20 years. India urgently needs to meet its 3E challenge of education, employability, and employment if it is to reap the demographic dividend. How India’s youth are trained and skilled will determine their readiness to be productive in the jobs of today and tomorrow. Against this background, through this first research initiative in its new Labour Economics Research Observatory (LERO), NCAER will examine the 3E chain in India, focusing on both the supply and demand for skills using a combination of analytics and surveys. Supported by J.P. Morgan, this two year research programme will engage key stakeholders from government, industry and skills training providers through a research advisory committee and convening; and as a research program will have the potential to contribute both to policy as well as practice pertaining to employability, labour markets and the skilling supply chain. The research will take a 360 degree perspective of the complex skilling environment to not only look at employability but also youth aspirations, employer requirements and interest, related policies as well as how skills ties into India’s education system.
Both the central and state governments in India operate a vast array of cash and in-kind transfers to protect its poor. But these social protection schemes often suffer from substantial leakages and poor targeting, distort market functioning by subsidising prices and thereby impose significant fiscal stress without commensurate social benefits. India is seeking to port these subsidies into direct-to-beneficiary transfers, often called Direct Benefit Transfers or DBT. Implementing DBT should be a means to an end, not only to reduce leakages in the Indian subsidy system, but also to ensure that the targeted poor and vulnerable in society get timely transfers at low cost in time and money. In the Indian context DBT readiness is the ability of states/UTs to pursue government to citizen (G2C) and government to bank/business solutions through the use of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) viz. electronic transfer of cash or in-kind benefits from government to citizen or for effecting cashless in- kind transfers. Accurate targeting of beneficiaries due to Aadhar and biometric verification makes it feasible to avoid leakages due to ghost beneficiaries and to avoid leakages due to duplication errors . The DBT-Readiness of all Indian states and Union Territories (UTs) will be assessed both annually and quarterly by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) over the next three years starting from 2016 to 2018 based on annual surveys. The quarterly assessment will be based off a combination of primary and secondary data available or made available by state/UT governments. States/UTs will be ranked relatively using the annual surveys. The quarterly rankings will be based off absolute index, which will help track states/UTs their own growth over time. In addition to the overall DBT assessment of states and UTs, this survey undertakes DBT Readiness of 10 Central Schemes.
A collaboration between NCAER and the Univeristy of Maryland, the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) was designed to complement existing Indian surveys by bringing together a wide range of indicators in a single survey. Unlike single-topic surveys, the IHDS collects data on different dimensions of human development like education, caste, gender relations and infrastructure. This breadth permits analyses of associations across a range of social and economic conditions. For example, studying indicators for children (e.g., learning, immunizations) requires joint consideration of the roles of poverty, family structure, gender relations, community context, and the availability of facilities.
The first round (IHDS-1) of the survey was completed in 2004-5 covering 41,554 urban and rural households in all states and union territories of India (except Andaman/Nicobar and Lakshadweep). The data are publicly available through ICPSR and are currently being used by about 7,000 users worldwide. During 2011-12, the second round (IHDS-II) re-interviewed the same households, creating one of the largest panel surveys in the world and providing a direct measure of India’s economic progress over seven years. The data from IHDS-II is in public domain. Data collection for the third wave of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-3), was completed in June, 2024.
More details about the IHDS and key findings can be found on the IHDS website.
For additional information, please contact Prof Sonalde Desai.
The underlying rationale of the study is to identify the determinants of land values in the NCT of Delhi. The study, apart from using standard statistical tools, would undertake several case studies to develop a better understanding of the determinants of spatial and inter-temporal variations of land values.
