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Long lines of migrant families walking across State borders to their hometowns during the pandemic-induced lockdown has brought to the forefront the importance of migration for the Indian economy, development, and society. However, it has also highlighted a lack of awareness of the magnitude of migration in India and the tenuous ties of many migrants to their destinations. This disconnect was largely due to the unavailability of adequate data on internal migration, resulting in a weak policy response when the pandemic struck. Internal migration is likely to gain more significance as India experiences heterogeneous demographic transformation, with the growing economies of the southern States increasingly relying on migrants from North India to augment their aging workforce. The absence of data and inconsistent definitions of migration hamper policymaking in diverse arenas, including social protection, education, and health.

NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre is hosting a web-based panel discussion with eminent researchers and experts to discuss the dynamics of internal migration in India, and the challenges involved in measurement and data collection, especially streams of migration that are poorly captured by existing data systems. Following are some of the questions that will be addressed by the panellists: Can we begin to define different types of internal migration? What would it take to improve the existing data collection mechanisms to better capture migration flows? What would new data systems look like? How would measurement differ for migrant men and women?

The discussion will be held among an interdisciplinary panel of researchers, policymakers, and journalists, who have studied migration extensively. Following are details of the moderators and panellists in the webinar:

Moderators:

Sonalde Desai is a Professor at NCAER with a joint appointment as Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). She is an internationally known demographer whose work deals primarily with human development in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. She leads the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), India’s only nationally representative panel study spanning two decades.

Reshma Roshania is an Associate Fellow at NCAER. Her research interests include nutrition, food policy, migration, and gender. She completed her PhD in Nutrition and Health Sciences in 2021 from Emory University, where she studied food environments and nutrition status among circular migrant families in Bihar. She has worked in global health and development for close to ten years, specialising in evaluation and research with various organisations including PATH, International Center for Research on Women, Save the Children, and International Medical Corps.

Panellists:

Chinmay Tumbe is passionate about migration, cities and history, and is currently a faculty member in the Economics Area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA). An alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science; the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore; Ruia College, Mumbai; and Rishi Valley School, Madanapalle; he has been a faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. He was a 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, and the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School, Boston. His first book, India Moving: A History of Migration, was published in 2018 and second book The Age of Pandemics, 1817-1920: How They Shaped India and the World, was published in 2020. He is a member of The Lancet COVID-19 India Taskforce and was a member of the Working Group on Migration of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation in 2016-17. He has published widely in leading journals and newspapers and helped set up the IIMA Archives.

Neetha N. is Professor at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), New Delhi. Prior to joining CWDS in 2006, she was Associate Fellow and Coordinator, Centre for Gender and Labour at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, NOIDA. Her research focuses on women’s employment, women workers in the informal sector, domestic workers, unpaid domestic and care work, female labour migration, and gender statistics. She has published extensively in national and international books and journals. Her recent edited books are ‘Working at Others Homes: The Specifies and Challenges of Paid Domestic Work (Tulika Books, 2018) and Migration, Gender and Care Economy, (with Irudaya Rajan, Routledge, 2019). She was the Co-Chairperson of the Working Group on Women’s Employment set up for the formulation of the current (14^th) Five Year Plan of the State Planning Board, Kerala.

Rajni Palriwala retired from the University of Delhi, Delhi School of Economics, as Professor of Sociology, where she also served as Head of the Department and Dean, Social Sciences. She has taught at the University of Delhi; University of Leiden, Netherlands; and SciencesPo, Paris. Her research falls within the broad area of gender relations, covering care and emotion, citizenship and the welfare state, kinship and marriage, dowry, women and work, migration, women’s movements and feminist politics, cross-cultural and comparative studies, and research methodology, though her teaching went beyond these issues. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, she has authored Changing kinship, family, and gender relations in South Asia: Processes, trends and issues (1994) and jointly authored Care, culture and citizenship: Revisiting the politics of welfare in the Netherlands (2005) and Planning families, planning gender: The adverse child sex ratio in selected districts (2008). She has jointly edited Marrying in South Asia: Shifting concepts, changing practices in a globalised world (2013), Marriage, migration, and gender (2008), Shifting circles of support: Contextualising kinship and gender relations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (1996), and Structures and strategies: Women, work and family in Asia (1990).

Chandrasekhar S., an alumnus of Delhi School of Economics and Pennsylvania State University, is Professor at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. He was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal 2016 by The Indian Econometric Society, for outstanding contributions to the field of quantitative economics. He has worked extensively on the issues of urbanisation, labour markets, and internal migration in India. He coordinated the research initiative, “Strengthen and Harmonize Research and Action on Migration in the Indian Context”, which was supported by a grant from Tata Trusts. The project also coincided with the Government of India constituting the Working Group to Study the Impact of Migration on Housing, Infrastructure, and Livelihood, of which Chandrasekhar was a member. He serves on a variety of government advisory panels connected with key statistics, including the Standing Committee on Statistics, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implemention, Working Group of Select Surveys, and the All India Financial Inclusion Survey by NABARD.

Mittali Sethi is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 2017 batch, Maharashtra cadre. She has served as the Sub-divisional Magistrate at Melghat in the Amravati district and as CEO, Zilla Parishad (rural local body) in the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. She is currently serving as the Director of VANAMATI, an agricultural research and extension institute. Her areas of interest and work include forest rights and tribal issues, public health, waste, and climate change as it applies to people’s lives, and participatory education-with-love for both children and adults.

Udit Misra is a journalist, and has reported on India’s economy and policy issues for the past two decades. Since 2019, he has been with The Indian Express, for which he writes a weekly explanatory column titled ExplainSpeaking. In 2021, he moderated a series of webinars on India’s internal migrants for the newspaper. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and is a Chevening South Asia Journalism Fellow from the University of Westminster.

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The NCAER Gender Hub and FESDIG (Feminist Economics Saturday Discussion Group) jointly organised a hybrid discussion on “What is Women’s Work? Challenges of Measurement for Policy Design” on 12 June 2023, at NCAER.

Despite the strong policy interest in women’s low and declining work participation in India, data and research on this subject continues to show contrasting and puzzling results. This discussion explored these puzzles and examined how far the definition of women’s work and its measurement are consistent with policy needs.

The discussion was held in two parts. During the first hour, participants from different backgrounds briefly offered their perspectives on definitions and measurement of women’s work, including work in the digital economy, the informal sector, and data biases in collection. The second hour was devoted to an open discussion on the topic.

The discussion was hosted by Sonalde Desai, Professor, NCAER; Pallavi Choudhuri, Senior Fellow, NCAER; and Bina Agarwal, Founder, FESDIG.

The other eminent participants in the discussion included Renana Jhabvala, SEWA Bharat; Poonam Muttreja, Population Foundation of India; Nayantara Sarma, World Bank; Deepita Chakravarty, Ambedkar University, Delhi; Shiva Kumar, Harvard Kennedy School;  Paromita Sen, SEWA Bharat; Bornali Bhandari, NCAER; Aiman Haque, SEWA Bharat; Saba Ahmed, SEWA Bharat; Nandini Dey, SEWA Bharat; Rosa Abraham, Azim Premji University; Ellina Samantroy, V.V. Giri National Labour Institute; Aasha Kapur Mehta, Institute for Human Development; Jeemol Unni, Ahmedabad University; Amaresh Dubey, NCAER and Jawaharlal Nehru University; Kieran Walsh, ILO; Ratna Sudarshan, former Institute of Social Studies Trust; and Sona Mitra, IWWAGE, Krea University.

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NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre (NCAER-NDIC) is hosting a webinar entitled, “DataTalk: An Online Conversation between Data Journalists and Data Producers”, on Thursday, 15 June 2023.

In recent years, the field of data and statistical journalism in India has grown in sophistication and depth. However, this also puts substantial demands on data systems. At the same time, data systems have faced tremendous challenges, particularly with the absence of face-to-face data collection during the pandemic. As we recover from the pandemic, we have a unique opportunity to build a more robust data infrastructure and empirically grounded public discourse. This will also enable us to return to some of our traditional data collection activities while utilising innovations and tools developed during the pandemic. However, this is only feasible if we can create a common ground between data producers and journalists.

The panel discussion hosted by NCAER-NDIC with eminent data journalists and leading data producers will focus on the challenges and opportunities faced by both sides. Some of the questions of interest will include: How do journalists cope with deadlines when deciding which data to report and how? How can data producers work with data journalists to place information in the public domain without fearing being misquoted? What skill sets do both sides need to make this a fruitful collaboration? What are the constraints under which each side operates?

The panellists in this discussion include some of India’s leading statistical journalists and data producers.

*After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details about joining the webinar. Invitations are tied to your email ID. During the webinar, please submit your questions using the Q&A box on your screen.

Moderator:

Sonalde Desai is a Professor at NCAER with a joint appointment as Distinguished University Professor in Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). She is an internationally known demographer whose work deals primarily with human development in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. At present, she is leading the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), India’s only nationally representative panel study spanning two decades.

Panellists:

Rukmini S. is an independent data communicator based in Chennai, India. Her work focuses on inequality, gender, caste, and politics. She was earlier National Data Editor of The Hindu and HuffPost India, and has written for a range of Indian and international publications. She won the Likho Awards for Excellence in Media in 2019. In 2020, she received an Honourable Mention for the Chameli Devi Jain Awards for an Outstanding Woman Journalist. Her pandemic podcast, The Moving Curve, won an Emergent Ventures COVID-19 India Prize in 2020. Rukmini’s work on estimating COVID deaths in India won a 2022 Sigma Award, the global data journalism awards, and a Jury’s Special Mention (Investigative Reporting) at the Asian College of Journalism Awards 2022. Her first book, Whole Numbers & Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India, was published by Westland in December 2021. It won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Non-Fiction) 2022. Her second book will be published by Westland in 2023.

Pramit Bhattacharya is a columnist who writes on statistics and economics. His Truth, Lies, and Statistics column appears in Mint, and the Simply Economics column in Hindustan Times. He was earlier the data editor at Mint, where he helped set up one of the country’s first data journalism units, Plain Facts in 2014. He won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award 2015 in the ‘Commentary and Interpretative Journalism’ category.

Mahesh Vyas is Managing Director and CEO of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd. (CMIE). He has been an observer of the Indian economy over the past four decades. He is the chief architect of CMIE’s databases including, Prowess, CapEx and Consumer Pyramids Household Survey. Prowess is India’s largest database on the performance of Indian companies, CapEx is India’s largest database on the implementation of investment projects to create new capacities in India, and the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey is India’s largest panel household survey. Mahesh writes regularly on the Indian economy for CMIE’s Economic Outlook service. His writings focus on labour markets, consumer sentiments, performance of enterprises, and capex investments. 

Abhishek Singh is a Professor in the Department of Public Health and Mortality Studies at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. He has published more than 100 research papers in peer-reviewed national/international journals. His areas of interest are mortality analysis (including maternal mortality), maternal and child health, gender issues, designing, implementing, and analysing large-scale surveys, among other things. He was instrumental in designing and implementing NFHS-4 (2015-16). He was visiting faculty as a Gates Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and during the 2011-2012 academic year, was a recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship to collaborate on research with faculty and students of the School of Health Sciences and Social Care University of Portsmouth UK. He is currently heading the Centre of Demography of Gender at IIPS and leading the Gender Equity and Demography Research (GENDER) project. He is also a co-Principal Investigator of NFHS-6.

P.C. Mohanan was a member of the Indian Statistical Service till 2015. He has worked in various capacities in the Central Statistical Office and the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). In the NSSO, he was involved in surveys on employment and unemployment, migration, literacy, and housing, among others. He also worked extensively for making government data open to research access. He was also a member of several Government Committees like the Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee, Expert Committee on Agricultural Statistics, Technical Group for Estimating Housing Shortage, and Committee on the Slum Index. He has published papers on various topics, including employment, migration, and housing conditions. He also contributes to newspapers on statistical issues. After retirement, he worked as a short-term consultant for international agencies like FAO, UNDP, and ILO. He was appointed as a member of the National Statistical Commission in 2018. Currently, he is the Chairman of the Kerala State Statistical Commission.

Jayant Banthia is former Registrar General and Census Commissioner who retired as Chief Secretary, Maharashtra. He has extensive experience with housing and population censuses, in both India and a range of developing countries such as Nigeria, Myanmar, and Lebanon. As a member of the Indian Administrative Service, in addition to being a demographer trained at the London School of Economics, he brings both an academic and a policy perspective to this discussion.

After decades of feminist advocacy, it is now accepted as a part of conventional wisdom that all data collection systems should provide gender-disaggregated data. However, this ‘add gender and stir’ approach often fails to capture data that is critical for developing gender-friendly policies, especially data on care responsibilities, access to public spaces, and, discrimination in employment. NCAER organised a discussion on re-imagining data systems from a gendered perspective to celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022.

In recent years, national data collection systems in India have faced considerable challenges. Lack of data, particularly at a time when data are most needed, have hampered both the evaluation of public policies and an understanding of women’s lived realities. The panellists at this discussion comprised a diverse group having extensive experience with the data and evidence ecosystem. They drew upon their past experiences to discuss the importance of gender data and strategies for ensuring its efficient collection and optimal use.

Broadly, the seminar address the following questions:

•  How can the existing data systems be re-imagined?
• What data should be collected and from whom?
• Who should collect it?
• How do we enable feminist advocates to move beyond data gatekeepers to access pertinent data?

The event was held in a hybrid mode, in-person and virtual. Speakers at this forum included the following:

Panellists:

Rukmini S. is an independent data journalist based in Chennai. In 2004, she began covering Mumbai city for the Times of India. Since 2010, she has specialised in data journalism. She was the first Data Editor of an Indian newsroom, initially at The Hindu and then at Huffpost India. She now writes for a range of publications, including Mint, IndiaSpend, and The Guardian. Her pandemic podcast, The Moving Curve, won an Emergent Ventures India COVID-19 Prize in 2020. She was awarded the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Mediaperson (Honourable Mention) in 2020 and the Likho Awards for Excellence in Media in 2019. She has a post-graduate Diploma in Social Communications Media and an MSc in Development Studies.

Diva Dhar, Deputy Director (Data and Evidence), Women’s Economic Empowerment, leads the global strategies at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and oversees investments on strengthening the gender data architecture and deepening research and evidence for women’s economic empowerment programming and policymaking. Prior to joining the team in 2019, she anchored research and evaluation portfolios for the foundation on nutrition, health systems, ICT, youth and gender in India. Previously, she worked for over a decade in public policy research and design for J-PAL, Innovations for Poverty Action, World Bank, Planning Commission of India, and other non-profit organisations in India, Morocco and Bangladesh. Diva is currently a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at the University of Oxford. She has a Master’s in International and Development Economics from Yale University.

Mayra Buvinic, an internationally recognised expert on gender and development, is a Senior Fellow with Data2X and a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for Global Development. Previously, she was Director for Gender and Development at the World Bank. She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) where she headed the Social Development Division and was founding member and President of the International Center for Research on Women. She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jeemol Unni is Professor of Economics at Ahmedabad University. Earlier she was Director at Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) and RBI Chair Professor of Economics at IRMA. She holds a PhD. and MPhil in Economics and was a post-doctoral Fellow at Economic Growth Center, Yale University. She is currently a member of the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics constituted by the Government of India. She is on the Editorial Board of The Indian Journal of Labour Economics and Journal of Development Policy and Practice. Her research addresses issues of informal labour, returns to education, social protection and women entrepreneurship. Her latest co-authored book is titled Women Entrepreneurship in the Indian Middle Class (Orient Blackswan, 2021).

Pallavi Choudhuri is a Fellow at the NCAER-National Data Innovation Center (NDIC). At NDIC, her work focuses on methodological innovations in measuring income, consumption, and women’s time use. Prior to joining NCAER, Choudhuri taught courses in Economics and Finance at the Grand Valley State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor and as an Instructor at the University of Wyoming. She has a PhD in Economics from the University of Wyoming.

Sonalde Desai is a Professor at NCAER with a joint appointment as Distinguished University Professor in Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). She is an internationally known demographer whose work deals primarily with human development in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. At present, she is leading the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), India’s only nationally representative panel study conducted in two rounds in 2004–05 and 2011–12. Preparations are currently on for the next round of IHDS.