Archives: Event

NCAER hosted a seminar on “Quality of Care and the Bypassing of Primary Health Centers in India—Implications for Ayushman Bharat” with Krishna Dipankar Rao, Johns Hopkins University. Shailender Swaminathan, Principal Economist, Leveraging Evidence for Access and Development (LEAD), KREA University, was the discussant. The seminar was attended by members of the NCAER Research Team, and invited guests from various eminent institutions including, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Integrated Research and Action for Development, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, International Food Policy Research Institute, and IDinsight.

Dr Rao pointed out that India is among many low- and middle-income countries that have invested substantial resources for strengthening facility-based and community-based primary health care services to provide affordable care for improving population health. Yet, patients in India often bypass the nearest government health centres offering free or subsidised services and seek more expensive care, often from private service providers. Dr Rao focused on the quality of care (clinical and structural) and its implications for new efforts to strengthen primary care through the Government of India’s recently launched Ayushman Bharat initiative. While tracing the genesis of the primary health care system in the country, he highlighted various issues that have brought this sector into recent focus, including the predominantly informal nature of primary health care and non-availability of certain crucial services at the primary centres; lessons from the National Rural Health Mission; the role of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in the health care system, particularly in rural areas; and wide variations in competencies for health care across the country.

The discussant, Dr Swaminathan stressed the need to mould the primary health care system to align with the goals of Ayushman Bharat. He also suggested the introduction of competency scores for various health centres to assess the quality of services delivered by them and to determine the actual drivers of health-seeking behaviour among patients, especially the factors motivating them to veer towards private health care providers.

Krishna Dipankar Rao is an Associate Professor in the Health Systems Program, Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins University. He is also Research Advisor, National Health Systems Resource Center, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. His research interests lie in the areas of health systems, primary health care, human resources for health, health financing, and economic evaluation. He teaches two graduate courses at Johns Hopkins– economic evaluation, and health financing in low- and middle-income countries.

The NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) and Institute for Financial Management Research-India Initiative for What Works (IFMR-IIWW) jointly organised an initiative called Kathopakathan (conversation) on Women’s Economic Empowerment at the Viceregal Hall, The Claridges, New Delhi, on March 24, 2018. NCAER-NDIC seeks to develop innovative approaches to collecting data for development, including data on gender, while IFMR-IIWW focuses on women’s economic empowerment through evaluation, research, and creation of a multi-stakeholder platform for synthesising and leveraging evidence to inform policy. During the conversation, structured and interactive discussions were held on the following two themes surrounding women’s economic empowerment with representatives from the spheres of research, policymaking, and data collection:

How can policy opportunities enhance women’s economic empowerment through participation in the workforce by countering the constraints faced by them in the labour market? 

Should the nature of data collection change given the evolving nature of work and contextual factors that influence such activities, especially since the available data sets on women’s economic participation like the NSS have apparently not kept pace with far-reaching changes in labour markets?

The first session was inaugurated by Anna Roy, Advisor and Head of the Department, Industry, Data Management and Analysis, NITI Aayog, who highlighted the importance of government and private agencies in collecting, cleansing and streamlining data, as well as upgrading government websites to make them more user-friendly. She said that NITI Aayog would be developing a data portal to consolidate different data sets from both government and private sources. NITI Aayog is also currently partnering with Mckinsey to build a women’s entrepreneurship platform (www.wep.gov.in), which will disseminate information on best business practices and the available Central and state schemes to help conduct research on women entrepreneurs.

Sonalde Desai, Senior Fellow, NCAER, and Professor, University of Maryland, introduced the workshop agenda and briefly talked about the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), set up by NCAER in collaboration with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan for strengthening India’s data ecosystem for the 21st Century challenges. Initial funding for NDIC is provided by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The primary goals of NDIC are:

• To pilot innovative data collection methods and to mainstream successful pilots into larger data collection efforts—data collection innovations will focus both on household surveys and big data, particularly uses of administrative data;
• To train a new generation of data scientists through formal and informal training; and
• To serve as a resource for diverse stakeholders including government data agencies and ministries.

Sharon Buteau, IFMR LEAD, pointed to the absence of financial platforms and services targeted at women, and to the imperative to distinguish between various kinds of work available for women. She emphasised that the digital transformation currently taking place in India should help connect women entrepreneurs with each other more effectively. The ‘ENGAGE’ platform that is a part of IWWAGE is one such forum that can bring women together and facilitate a discussion on women’s empowerment.

In her presentation on “Future of Work: Opportunities for Women”, Farzana Afridi, Associate Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, and Research Fellow, IZA, outlined the importance of using the life-cycle approach for studying women’s labour/employment in addition to the current static methodology because women face different constraints at different stages of their lives. She also cited data to show the huge gender gap in imparting of skills to girls and boys, and reiterated that most women migrate after marriage, which reduces their access to social networks and kinship. For instance, only 20 per cent of the rural married women in the age group of 15-60 years were reportedly in the labour force as compared to 50 per cent of the rural unmarried women. Several supply side and demand constraints also cause low women’s labour force participation, and need to be tackled urgently.

The second presentation on “Employment Statistics and Their Shortcomings” was made by Radhicka Kapoor, Senior Fellow, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). She identified the various surveys on labour force conducted by the NSS such as household surveys, including the NSS employment and unemployment (organised and unorganised) survey, and the Labour Bureau’s household survey. The enterprise level surveys include the Annual Survey of Industries, the NSS Survey of Unorganised and Non-agricultural Enterprises, the Economic Census, the Quarterly Employment Survey undertaken by the Labour Bureau in eight selected sectors, and the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Census by the Ministry of MSME. These surveys show that data in India is neither comprehensive in coverage nor available on a real-time basis. India’s employment data architecture is thus in a state of transition.

The presentations were followed by policy perspectives by P.C. Mohanan of the National Statistical Commission and Santhosh Mathew, formerly Joint Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development. They highlighted the need for innovation and more comprehensive research on inclusion of data on women in the national level employment statistics. They also averred that the changing cultural and social milieu needs to be incorporated in the data ecosystem of the country. Better management of data can also help in integrating the younger, more aspirational and more mobile sections among women into the labour market. Finally, it is imperative to promote skilling of the labour force, especially women.

The discussions at the Kathopakathan event are part of a series of activities to be undertaken by NCAER-NDIC for building research capacity, and promoting innovation and excellence in data collection in the country.

A brainstorming session on ‘Methodologies for Collection of Time Use Data’, organised by NCAER’s newly set up National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), was held at NCAER, New Delhi, on January 12, 2018. Apart from Shekhar Shah, Director-General, NCAER, and Sonalde Desai, Senior Fellow, NCAER and Director of NCAER’s newly set up National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), the session was attended by pioneers and researchers in the collection of time use data in India, including Rakesh Maurya, Director, CSO, MoSPI; Devaki Jain, eminent writer and feminist economist; Ashwini Deshpande, Delhi School of Economics; J.P. Bhattacharjee and Sachin Kumar, NSSO; Shambhavi Srivastava, IFMR Lead; and Ellina Samantroy, V.V. Giri National Labour Institute.

The context of the session was the increasing interest in women’s care work burden, which has necessitated collection of time use data and analyses of how women spend their time. This has, in turn, led to advocacy for better measurement of women’s Work Participation Rates and changes in the way the NSSO captures women’s domestic activities and subsidiary work status. In recent years, the Government of India has affirmed its commitment to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to the implementation of the Resolution on Statistics on Work, Employment and Labour Underutilisation. Data on time use is a key component of both. The report by a NITI Aayog task force on collection of employment data also calls for regular time use surveys. However, conducting time use surveys can be both expensive and time consuming.

The session was initiated by Dr Sonalde Desai, who said that generation of new ideas for data collection on time use is a seminal requirement for data collection, in general, as it reflects the changes in the demand and supply of data, and also entails the use of technology for reducing the cost of data collection. She anticipated that the innovative ideas generated at this session would contribute significantly to the NDIC work on time use in the near future. The technical session was chaired by Professor A.K. Shiva Kumar, Adviser, UNICEF.

Professor Indira Hirway, Director, Centre for Development Alternatives, in her presentation, outlined the importance of data collection in time use studies, which provide detailed information on how individuals allocate their time on activities listed under the System of National Accounts (SNA), non-SNA activities, and personal activities. This data is also important for analysing human capital formation, and for examining the critical concerns of an economy related to various parameters like poverty and unemployment, and for incorporating this work in the designing and monitoring of policy. In addition, such data helps in studying the care economy comprising both paid as well as unpaid work, in order to understand the workforce and ensure that no activity, paid or unpaid, is left out of the estimation and valuation of work. She also discussed the various components and types of time use surveys, and how they can be supplemented by independent 24-hour diary surveys. She pointed out that India was one of the first countries in the developing world to conduct a national time use survey using a 24-hour time diary in 1998-99, which has helped in policy designing and development of analytical tools pertaining to various areas of study including employment and unemployment, time poverty, valuation of unpaid work in satellite accounts, gender budgeting, analysis of macroeconomic and social policies and programmes. She concluded her presentation by enlisting the challenges faced by researchers in collecting time use data in the country and the possible ways of overcoming these challenges.

A presentation by Professor Liana Sayer, Director of the Maryland Time Use Laboratory and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, followed. She averred that the challenges being discussed at the workshop are also being faced by researchers on time use in the USA. The various issues raised by Professor Sayer included the strategies adopted in the US to produce data on productive labour and childcare; the application of time use research for understanding employment and family relationships; linkages of time use patterns on a long-term basis; evaluation of care versus leisure activities; use of new technologies to collect and harvest time use data; and the possibility of combining the survey on time use with other surveys to ensure a better response from the target audience.

Thereafter, the participants discussed on matters such which included; NSSO’s plans to bring out a more systematic survey module for time use to enable more scientific and comprehensive area sampling and stratification of households; treating a past NCAER-NSSO study as a benchmark for identifying best practices in the field; need to assess the time spent by women in simultaneous activities by examining different context variables; employment of different coding techniques and joint appointment of male and female investigators for household interviews; and use of advanced investigative tools and modern data collection methods like computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI) to evolve simple yet rigorous methods of collecting time use data without compromising on the quality of the data.