National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, poverty and prices in rural India

The objective of this analysis is mainly to construct an intuitive measure of the performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India. The focus is on divergence between demand and supply at the district level. Some related issues addressed are: (i) whether the gap between demand and supply responds to poverty; and (ii) whether recent hikes in NREGS wages are inflationary. Our analysis confirms responsiveness of the positive gap between demand and supply to poverty. Also, apprehensions expressed about the inflationary potential of recent hikes in NREGS wages have been confirmed. More importantly, higher NREGS wages are likely to undermine self-selection of the poor in it.     

The Effectiveness of Jobs Reservation: Caste,Religion and Economic Status in India

This article investigates the effect of jobs reservation on improving the economic opportunities of persons belonging to India's Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Using employment data from the 55^th NSS round, the authors estimate the probabilities of different social groups in India being in one of three categories of economic status: own account workers; regular salaried or wage workers; casual wage labourers. These probabilities are then used to decompose the difference between a group X and forward caste Hindus in the proportions of their members in regular salaried or wage employment. This decomposition allows us to distinguish between two forms of difference between group X and forward caste Hindus: ‘attribute’ differences and ‘coefficient’ differences. The authors measure the effects of positive discrimination in raising the proportions of ST/SC persons in regular salaried employment, and the discriminatory bias against Muslims who do not benefit from such policies. They conclude that the boost provided by jobs reservation policies was around 5 percentage points. They also conclude that an alternative and more effective way of raising the proportion of men from the SC/ST groups in regular salaried or wage employment would be to improve their employment‐related attributes.     

On hunger and child mortality in India

Despite accelerated growth there is pervasive hunger, child undernutrition and mortality in India. Our analysis focuses on their determinants. Raising living standards alone will not reduce hunger and undernutrition. Reduction of rural/urban disparities, income inequality, consumer price stabilization, and mothers’ literacy all have roles of varying importance in different nutrition indicators. Somewhat surprisingly, public distribution system (PDS) do not have a significant effect on any of them. Generally, child undernutrition and mortality rise with poverty. Our analysis confirms that media exposure triggers public action, and helps avert child undernutrition and mortality. Drastic reduction of economic inequality is in fact key to averting child mortality, conditional upon a drastic reordering of social and economic arrangements.     

Neural Network-Based Damage Detection from Transfer Function Changes

This article puts forth the work on a neural network-based approach to determine the degree of damaged floors of the building considering changes in the transfer function. The transfer function is considered for that part of forced vibration in which system vibrates linearly after the structure has been damaged considering the building is instrumented during the earthquake. The results showed that accuracy of degree of damage detected increased with the increase in the number of combination of damages. The instrumentation of the first floor is expected to give best results for damage detection based on the transfer function-based approach.     

Caste and Regional Influences on the Practice of ‘Untouchability’ in India

Millions of people in India are born with scars that will last a lifetime. These are scars of social rather than physical blemish and they reduce the capacity of such persons to function in life, free of prejudice and untainted by stigma. The source of these wounds is the practice of ‘untouchability’, meaning that any physical contact with them is avoided because they are considered ‘unclean’. This article studies the nature of households in India that admit to ‘practising untouchability’ — in the sense of avoiding contact with persons they regard as unclean — and contrasts such households with those that claim to be not ‘practising untouchability’. Such a contrast is possible because the data used, which are from the Indian Human Development Survey, associate with each household a wealth of economic, social and demographic data. Consequently, it is possible to estimate the likelihood of a household practising untouchability, conditional upon the values pertaining to it of a number of relevant factors. These include its social group, its main source of income, the highest educational level of its members, its urban or rural location and its region of residence. The central finding of the analysis is that the practice of untouchability is determined more by the region in which a household is located than by the caste to which it belongs.     

Births,Infants and Children: An Econometric Portrait of Women and Children in India

This article undertakes an econometric analysis of the constellation of factors that serve to determine some outcomes with respect to demography and to schooling in India. These are: the numbers of pregnancies, live births and infant survivals to women, the chances of children being enrolled at school and, if enrolled, of continuing in school. The econometric estimates are based on unit record data from a survey — carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi — of 33,000 rural households in sixteen states of India. The study concludes that a broad spectrum of factors affects these outcomes. The literacy of women is important but so is the literacy of men. Infrastructure, in the form of safe drinking water and easy access to medical facilities, is important for infant survivals and, in the shape of easy access to schools, is important for school enrolment. Parental occupation matters for both infant survivals and schooling: children born to women who work as labourers are disadvantaged, relative to other children, in terms of their chances of surviving infancy and, if they do survive, of receiving schooling. The number of siblings that a child has affects his/her schooling outcomes, and gender, religion and region play an important role.