Intergenerational Effects of Women's Status: Evidence from Joint Indian Households

About the Speaker:
Diane Coffey is a demographer who studies social influences on health in India, specifically the intergenerational transmission of poor population health resulting from India's exceptionally poor maternal nutrition. Her research traces links among gender, stratification, and poor birth, childhood, and adult health outcomes. She has also studied the causes and consequences of poor sanitation in India. Diane is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi, and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University.

Rethinking Reservations: The Unintended Consequences of Rotating Quotas in Panchayati Raj

Ramya Parthasarathy

Last week, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Sumitra Mahajan, commented on the need to reconsider India’s extensive system of caste-based reservations. Citing Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the noted Dalit jurist and social reformer, she said, “Ambedkarji had said, ‘Give reservations for ten years and after ten years, do a rethink. Bring them to that stage.’ We have done nothing.” She went on to note that, despite over fifty years of affirmative action for India’s most marginalized communities, caste-based inequality and discrimination persist in India.

Rethinking Commercial vs. Altruistic Surrogacy in India

Nishtha Lamba

In mid-October, the Supreme Court of India raised questions against the practice of commercial surrogacy. Later that month, the Central government responded with a ban on allowing foreign couples from hiring surrogates in India, permitting only altruistic surrogacy for infertile Indian couples. Although these changes are not surprising given the recent ban on commercial surrogacy in neighboring countries such as Thailand and Nepal, the justification of such a move needs greater scrutiny.

Burning Bright: The Smoke and Mirrors of Mumbai's Industrial Fires

About the Speaker:
Maura Finkelstein is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Muhlenberg College. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University's Anthropology program. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research engages with deindustrialization, labor and housing rights and identity formation in Mumbai, India. Her work intersects with urban studies, feminist theory and queer studies and thinks through memory and place-making in modern South Asia.

Lessons from Bihar: What the Bihar 2015 Election Says About Indian Politics

Neelanjan Sircar

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), suffered a crushing defeat in the 2015 Bihar state election. In the 2014 national election, the NDA won 172 out of 243 assembly constituency (AC) segments. But in the 2015 Bihar election, just 18 months later, the NDA won only 58 ACs. As the standard election post-mortem draws to a close, it is useful to think about how this election informs our understanding of the Indian electorate.

Do Local Leaders Prioritize the Poor? Distributive Preferences in India

Mark Schneider

In an assessment of the quality of India’s implementation of anti-poverty programs in 1985, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi famously said: “For every rupee spent by the government for the welfare of the common man, only seventeen paise reached him.” That state of affairs was one of the motivations for the 1993 passage of the 73rd amendment, which decentralized the implementation of government anti-poverty programs to local governments.

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