Sonalde Desai and Pallavi Choudhuri presented a paper titled “India’s Occupational Transformation: A Tale of Two Escalators” at a conference on India’s Economy in a Changing Global Landscape at Cornell University, Ithaca on October 14, 2023. India has undergone tremendous changes over the past three decades including educational expansion and rising incomes in certain occupations. However, opportunities in these high-paying occupations are limited, generating tremendous competition for scarce jobs. This presentation examined the extent to which opportunities for getting good jobs are evenly distributed.
NDIC team members were conspicuous by their presence at the 2022 Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Conference. NDIC Deputy Director Santanu Pramanik organised and chaired a session on COVID-19 vaccination. Pallavi Choudhuri, Senior Fellow, NCAER, presented her work on “Impact of COVID-19 on Household Economic Status in India” in an oral presentation session. Debasis Barik, Fellow, NCAER, organised and chaired a session on Social Institutions and Population Health. This session also included Pallavi Choudhuri as the discussant. Other NDIC team members, Ruchi Jain, Reem Ashraf, Sumiran Chandra, and Abhinav Motheram presented their excellent work through posters. The poster by Ruchi Jain and Charu Jain on “Empirical Investigations on Causes and Implications of Chronic Absenteeism Behaviour on Well-being of Primary School Students in India”, has won a PAA 2022 Poster Award! Last but not the least, PAA President Professor Sonalde Desai participated as a distinguished expert in a panel discussion on “The Role the Demographic Community Must Play in Supporting Democracy, Equity, and Human Rights in the United States and around the World”.
Santanu Pramanik, Senior Fellow at NCAER and Deputy Director of NDIC, presented on “Statistical validation of a large-scale web survey during the COVID-19 pandemic in India” at the University of Michigan, Survey Research Centre Faculty Seminar. This was a joint work with Abhinav Motheram, Research Analyst, NCAER-NDIC and Soumi Roy Chowdhury, ex colleague at NCAER.
Using data from the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (CTIS) from India, the largest public health web survey, the authors examine the bias in the estimates of vaccine uptake, a population measure which changes rapidly with time. Their findings show that the bias in CTIS estimates of vaccine uptake is not constant over time, rather it increases up to a certain point of time and then decreases. Since the absence of independently verified ‘ground truth’ or ‘gold standard’ for assessing bias in surveys is well acknowledged, they discuss the need for statistical representativeness of web surveys with respect to key demographic characteristics of respondents, which are often correlated with many outcome variables.
Dr Sonalde Desai, Professor at NCAER, who holds a joint appointment at University of Maryland, USA, has recently been appointed as Distinguished University Professor (DUP) at the University. DUP status is a permanent honorific title that recognises exceptional records in research, teaching, and service.
Dr Desai has also been appointed to the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences based in Washington, D.C. In addition, she has been elected as President of the Population Association of America (PAA) for 2022
The NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) has launched a gender data hub, supported by a five-year grant from Co-Impact. This hub will focus on research supporting evidence-based policy design from a gender perspective. It will serve as a resource for researchers, policy-makers, civil society representatives, and journalists by undertaking gender-focused analyses of data in areas of livelihoods, health, education, and family formation. The activities undertaken by this hub will include enhancing access to data collected by NCAER, visiting fellowships for practitioners and researchers, and seminars addressing strategies for incorporating a gender lens in data collection processes. Sonalde Desai, Professor, NCAER and Centre Director, NDIC, and Pallavi Choudhuri, Senior Fellow, NCAER, will lead this initiative.
