NCAER - NATIONAL DATA INNOVATION CENTRE
NCAER faculty member Dr. Debasis Barik delivered a special lecture at the Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He spoke on the Implications of Hypogamous Marriage on Household Economy and Children’s Education in Contemporary India. This was organized by Department of Economics, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore.
NCAER faculty member Dr. Debasis Barik delivered a lecture in a session on Health inequality, Poverty and Life Course Effects in the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC) Platinum Jubilee International Conference on Statistics and Data Science for Development Planning on September 23rd at Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Kolkata. He discussed how economic hardships experienced throughout life affect adult mortality in India.
This conference was organized to commemorate the Platinum Jubilee of the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC), which is an associate institute of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). ISEC has regularly been conducting training programmes for international participants, the most notable being an annual ten-month diploma programme in Statistical Theory and Applications, seventy-six terms of which have already been conducted in the last 75 years.
Dr. Reshma Roshania, Associate Fellow with the National Data Innovation Centre, presented at the 10th Annual Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy Week held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the end of June. In a session focused on the impact of policies and programmes on healthy diets, nutrition security, and agricultural production, she presented a paper co-authored with Dr. Sonalde Desai entitled “Expansion of the Public Distribution System and Impacts on Household Food Consumption: Longitudinal Evidence From India”. Dr. Roshania also chaired the conference session on Gender, Equity and Empowerment.
The ANH Academy Week is a series of annual events that bring together the community of researchers, practitioners and policymakers working at the intersection of agriculture, food systems, nutrition, and health. The objective of the ANH Academy Week is to foster knowledge exchange, innovation and learning around interdisciplinary ANH research.
The ANH Academy Week format consists of two interlinked components:
The National Statistics Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), in collaboration with the Indian School of Business (ISB), organized a Data Users Conference on 27th May 2025. Dr Pallavi Choudhuri (NCAER) served as a panellist, highlighting the growing female work participation in the unincorporated sector & the value of forward-looking private sector CAPEX data for policy & research.
The panel moderated by the Dr. Ashwini Chhatre (ISB), featuring Dr. Pallavi Choudhuri (NCAER), Shri Dharmakirti Joshi (CRISIL), Dr. M. Suresh Babu (MIDS), Prof. Rishi Kumar (BITS Pilani), and Prof. C. Veeramani (CDS). The discussions highlighted the growing value of CAPEX data for policy, research, and forecasting. The panelists also deliberated on the importance of micro-data for the unorganized sector in shaping policy reform.
The conference aimed to deepen the interaction between data producers and users through discussion on two newly released surveys—the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) 2023–24 and the Forward-Looking Survey on Private Sector Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) Investment Intentions.
Professor Sonalde Desai presented paper titled “Rethinking Social Safety Nets in a Changing Society: Evidence from India Human Development Survey” at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Philadelphia in partnership with the South Asia Center & Dept of Sociology.
About the Seminar:
With a growing economy and declining poverty, India faces a curious challenge in providing a social safety net to its citizens. Using data from three rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), collected in 2004-05, 2011-12, and 2022-24, this seminar shows that households face considerable transition in and out of poverty as the economy grows. Historically, India’s approach to social safety nets has involved identifying the poor and providing them with priority access to various social protection programs that include both in-kind and cash assistance—however, the nature of poverty changes with economic growth. This churn in households’ economic circumstances makes it difficult to identify and target the poor precisely.
Using unique, newly collected panel data, Professor Desai makes three observations about India’s anti-poverty programs: (1) Identification of households as poor (now dubbed priority households) relies on identification exercises carried out every 10-15 years and assumes that poverty status is relatively static. However, results presented in this seminar will document a substantial transition in and out of poverty. (2) This ex-ante identification of needy households leads to relatively weak correlation between households’ actual economic status and access to social safety nets. This should not be assumed to be an example of elite capture but rather an artefact of a static program design. (3) Social safety nets may need to be redesigned in a way that is responsive to changing economic conditions and unexpected events, both at an individual and at a community level.
