NCAER - NATIONAL DATA INNOVATION CENTRE
The COVID pandemic has understandably grabbed most of the Government’s attention, becoming the single largest health focus in the country currently, but as India moves ahead to deal with this challenge, it would do well to simultaneously focus on the health of its most precious human resource, its children.
The establishment of a national expert group for Covid-19 vaccine distribution and Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN) to track and manage vaccine stocks and storage is welcome. However, little attention has been directed towards the last-mile challenges in vaccine distribution. Three challenges deserve particular attention.
Women’s limited intra-household decision-making power has several dimensions: geographic, cultural, economic, and demographic. The dimension we focus on in this paper relates to women’s transition into marriage. Marriages in India are near universal and age at marriage is low implying that nearly all women spend a large part of their lives in a marriage. However, little is known about the bearing events transpiring at the beginning of a woman’s marriage have on the path of her decision-making power in the household over her life course. Drawing on the life course theoretical framework, we argue that household authority follows a trajectory, which begins at least with her transition to marriage. Our analysis using panel data of 20,927 mothers from IHDS indicate three marriage types- self-choice marriages (5 per cent), parent-arranged with no choice on the part of young women (39 per cent) and parent-arranged – with some choice (56 per cent). Women who started married life in self-choice marriages later end up with the most decision-making power. But a complex pattern of power relationships emerges among wives, husbands, and in-laws. ‘Some-choice’ marriages empower husbands and not the parents-in-law while ‘no-choice’ marriages typically benefit the parents-in-law and not the husbands or the wives.
The more academic American Association for Public Opinion Research’s (AAPOR) postmortem report on the 2016 election polls recognised that state polls ‘clearly underestimated Trump’s support in the Upper Midwest’.
This is part of a series of Measurement Briefs from the NCAER National Data Innovation Centre. Based on the findings from the Delhi NCR Coronavirus Telephone Survey, Rounds 1 and 2, this particular Brief is set in the backdrop of the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent loss…
