Background: The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across countries, causing an unprecedented healthcare crisis and supply chain disruptions. Our paper focuses on how households coped and the role of expanded Indian government food subsidies in mitigating food insecurity.
Objective: We use panel data from two rounds of household surveys (2019 and 2021) to examine changes in per capita household expenditure and how these differed across occupation and income groups. We also discuss the role of in-kind assistance, extended during the pandemic, in smoothing food consumption.
Methods: We use fixed effects panel regression to estimate changes in per capita expenditure on various items in the household budget before and after the onset of the pandemic. We also estimate shifts in the composition of the household food basket between the two time periods.
Results: In the survey area, both per capita incomes and per capita household expenditure decreased, but the expenditure decrease was largely concentrated in discretionary items, leaving food consumption unchanged. The government policy of distributing practically free cereals, combined with household emphasis on protecting food expenditure, helped avert a substantial decline in food consumption and even led to a slight increase in dietary diversity.
Conclusions: The pre-existing social safety net in the form of a food distribution program helped cushion the impact of the pandemic-related income decline.
Contribution: Our examination of India’s expanded free food program during the pandemic contributes to the literature on the role of in-kind assistance during catastrophic emergencies.
Drawing on nationally representative data from two waves of the India Human Development Survey, this paper examines how family structures, functional health, work participation, and state support interact to shape the well-being of Indians aged 60 and above. We document a gradual decline in intergenerational co-residence, alongside rising proportions of older adults
living alone or only with a spouse. While family remains the primary source of care and income support, the role of the state has significantly expanded through pensions and health insurance schemes. We argue that the emerging landscape of ageing in India rests on a shifting “trinity” of support—family, self, and the state—each of which must adapt to demographic and gender transformations to ensure secure and dignified ageing.
Using data from a primary survey conducted in rural India, this paper examines how two key survey design features—respondent identity and question framing—affect employment estimates. First, it estimates the causal impact of (a) replacing a single weekly employment question with a set of detailed activity-specific questions, and (b) changing the reference period from a week to individual days. The detailed module yields significantly higher estimates of women’s employment with no corresponding effect for men. Second, using spousal respondent pairs, the paper finds that proxy-reports by men significantly underestimate women’s employment while men’s employment estimates do not differ between self- and proxy- reports. Within different types of employment however there are significant deviations for both genders. Intra-household analysis suggests misreporting is driven by asymmetric information and gender norms. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of self-reporting and detailed questions for accurately measuring employment with implications for improving survey design in resource-constrained contexts.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are now the leading cause of premature mortality in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), accounting for more than 80% of early NCD deaths worldwide. As LMICs undergo rapid demographic, nutritional, and epidemiological transitions, obesity has emerged as a central driver of cardiometabolic risk—particularly among women. Although NCDs have long been characterised as “diseases of affiuence” in developing country settings, accumulating evidence suggests that this social gradient is weakening. New longitudinal evidence from India provides timely insights into how rising obesity may be reshaping the distribution of NCD risk across socioeconomic groups.
Using two waves of the nationally representative panel data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2004-05 & 2011- 12, which followed more than 24,000 women of reproductive age over seven years, Barik(2025) assessed the risk of developing non- communicable disease (NCDs) like hypertension, diabetes, or heart disease among the overweight/obese women. The study demonstrates that overweight and obesity significantly increase the likelihood of subsequent NCD onset, independent of age, education, caste, and household economic status. Crucially, the analysis shows that the rich–poor gap in NCD risk narrows sharply once women become overweight or obese, indicating that excess body weight acts as a powerful leveller of disease risk across socio-economic strata.
Internal migration of labor (or labor migration) from rural to urban areas was once thought to be a necessary process to meet labor demand at the urban industrial sectors. The classical two-sector migration models assumed that people migrate from less remunerative agricultural sector to the urban industrial sector, where expected rate of labor return was higher (Lewis, 1954; Ranis & Fei, 1961). This process was considered beneficial, since labor force was being shifted from the locations where their marginal productivities were assumed to be zero to the places where they turned not only positive but also were growing rapidly as a result of capital accumulation and technological advancement. These migration models were developed largely in the context of advanced industrial economies where the existence of the full or near-full employment in urban areas were assumed implicitly. The validity of these models starts underperforming once the rural to urban migration rate exceeds the rate of urban job creation. This makes the classical two-sector migration models irrelevant in the context of developing countries, where there remains surplus labor even in the urban centers (Harris & Todaro, 1970; Todaro, 1968, 1969, 1976, 1996). Internal migration in developing countries is often characterized by over-crowding of semi-skilled or unskilled rural labor migrants in the urban work place. Though expected wage rate in the urban is higher than the rural areas, probability of securing a high-paid urban job is much less among the new entrants. Consequently, they either take up casual or part-time jobs or remain unemployed for sometimes (Todaro, 1980).
