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A webinar discussion on the Long-term impact of the pandemic on people’s lives and lessons for developing an inclusive social protection programme, moderated by Dr Sonalde Desai, Professor, NCAER, was held on March 23, 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic could have a long-term impact for the people of the country due to the unexpected deaths of family members, loss of livelihoods, decline in household income, school closures and inability to access alternative methods of remote learning for students, and lack of access to routine healthcare services. The NCAER National Data Innovation Centre in collaboration with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) recently published the India COVID-19 Poverty Monitor Bulletin assessing the consequences of the pandemic for the vulnerable populations and the risks of impoverishment faced by them. CPAN’s COVID-19 Poverty Monitoring Initiative is supported by the Covid Collective, a rapid social science research response to inform decision-making on COVID-19 related development challenges.

As a follow-up to the launch of the bulletin, we are organising a webinar to analyse the potential long-term impact of the pandemic on people’s lives and lessons to be learnt for developing an inclusive social protection programme. The panellists at this discussion comprise researchers, policy makers, and bureaucrats with extensive on-ground experience, as well as an overall understanding of the impact of the pandemic and social protection programmes that could help mitigate this impact.

Panellists:

Tanuka Endow is a Professor at the Institute for Human Development (IHD) and the co-ordinator for the Centre for Gender Studies at IHD. Her work is mainly in the area of education, including on the issues of out-of-school children and low-cost private schools. She has worked on Human Development reports and vision documents for various States, including Delhi and Uttarakhand. She has recently contributed to a Human Development Report for the Scheduled Tribes. Dr Endow has engaged in a collaborative study with UNICEF on the post-COVID situation for vulnerable populations in India.

Paromita Sen set up and now runs the Research and Data Vertical at SEWA Bharat, where she and her team conduct research on entrepreneurship, empowerment, labour, disaster resilience, and leadership amongst others—all through the lens of gender and the informal economy. Under the aegis of the SEWA leadership, she has represented SEWA and has been involved in work with NITI Aayog, the Delhi Government, National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM), Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), International Labour Organization (ILO), and the Lok Sabha, amongst others.

Manjistha Banerji is a Fellow at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). Her primary areas of research are education, family demography, social change and gender, migration, and survey methods. At the NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), she is involved with experimentations on different data collection techniques, telephonic surveys to assess the impact of the COVID pandemic in Delhi NCR, qualitative data collection to understand the risk of impoverishment in the context of COVID-19, and in questionnaire design for the upcoming round of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS).

S.M. Vijayanand is Former Chief Secretary to the Government of Kerala. He has earlier also served in various capacities in the Government of India, including as the Secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj; and Additional Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development, among other positions. He spearheaded the Rajiv Gandhi Drinking Water Mission, Ministry of Sanitation, Government of India (1992-1996). He has also conceptualised and operationalised ‘Kudumbashree’, a women’s Self-Help Group movement in the State of Kerala.

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. 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.

How have the lives of residents of Delhi and other areas in the National Capital Region (NCR) changed over the past two years since the advent of COVID?  NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NCAER-NDIC) team discussed results from the Delhi Metropolitan Area Study (DMAS), which interviewed residents from Delhi-NCR in 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, and has continued to follow their lives since then, as they have struggled to protect their health and livelihoods, and to educate their children through the biggest global crisis of our generation. 

 The NCAER-NDIC team interviewed over 5,200 households in NCR, with samples drawn from Delhi as well as districts in the neighbouring States of Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. The DMAS survey was initiated in early 2019 and continued until November 2021, allowing us to assess the lives of our respondents before and after COVID-19, and the changes brought about by the pandemic. These households have lived through the difficulties and challenges caused by COVID-19 infections and the lockdowns designed to control the spread of the disease.

This webinar discussed the findings on:

• Experience of COVID-19 infection and its severity;
• COVID-19 vaccinations;
• Management of non-communicable diseases during the pandemic;
• Impact of school closure on education and access to digital learning;
• Changes in employment patterns and financial recovery;
• Trends in food consumption and role of social policies; and
• Perceptions regarding the decision to impose the nationwide lockdown during the early phase of the pandemic.

 The NCAER press note on DMAS findings is available on this webpage.          

Sonalde Desai is a Professor at NCAER with a joint appointment as Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), which has been established by NCAER in collaboration with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan. 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, Sonalde Desai 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.   

Santanu Pramanik is a Senior Fellow at NCAER and the Deputy Director of the National Data Innovation Centre. He is a Statistician and Survey Methodologist by training. His research interests encompass survey methods, data quality, remote monitoring of data collection activities, randomised controlled trials, small area estimation, and the application of these methods across different substantive domains, including vaccination, health insurance and healthcare expenditure, and family planning. He has earlier worked as a Research Scientist at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), and as a Survey Statistician at National Opinion Research Center, an independent affiliate of the University of Chicago.
The other team members who partcipated in the conversation include Reem Ashraf, Ruchi Jain, Abhinav Motheram, Debasis Barik, Manjistha Banerji, and Pallavi Choudhuri.

The NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) held a seminar on “Employment Decline and Recovery during the Pandemic”, on October 7, 2021. This webinar was the fourth in a series of thought-provoking discussions on research methodologies organised by NDIC, in which distinguished speakers in the field share their views. The participants in the discussion included Sonalde Desai, NCAER and the University of Maryland; Ankur Sarin, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Rahul Lahoti, ETH, Zurich and Azim Premji University; and Kaushik Krishnan, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Santanu Pramanik, Senior Fellow and the Deputy Director of the National Data Innovation Centre at NCAER, moderated the session.

Over the last 18 months, the pandemic has taken its toll on the lives and livelihoods of individuals around the globe. Unfortunately, the social distancing requirements have also made it difficult for us to measure the impact of this catastrophe. The speakers in this webinar represented research projects with diverse goals and methodologies; a conversation among them is designed to understand the employment impact of the pandemic and recovery using different methods of data collection. This enriching discussion offered a unique opportunity for exploring the short- and long-term economic effects on different segments of the Indian population from a holistic perspective.

Sonalde Desai presented on “Employment Vulnerability during the Pandemic”.

Desai is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Professor at NCAER, and Director of NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre. She is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social inequalities in developing countries, focusing on gender and class inequalities in human development. She leads the India Human Development Survey and has been elected as the President of the Population Association of America for 2022.

Ankur Sarin spoke on “Vulnerabilities in Rural India: Surveys by Field-based Organisations”.

Sarin is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. A shared theme in his research is attention to the consequences of inequalities and instruments used to counter them. These include public policies, social enterprises, and movements. In his recent work, he has tried to use field-based research to study and facilitate the fulfilment of policy obligations to citizens, especially children. He holds a Ph.D. (Public Policy) from the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and a BA (Economics), Bates College.

Rahul Lahoti presented on “Lessons and Challenges from Measuring Employment and Incomes during the Pandemic.”

Lahoti is a researcher at ETH, Zurich, and Faculty Fellow at Center for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University. His research focuses on gender, labour markets, poverty, and inequality. He was involved in three phone surveys during the pandemic and has analysed secondary data to understand the distributional impacts of the pandemic on employment and income. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University, New York.

Kaushik Krishnan presented on “Employment during the lockdowns as captured by the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS)”.

Krishnan works in the Household Survey division of CMIE. His primary responsibility is to deliver record-level data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey to researchers. He holds an LLM and Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley.