Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research

About: Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research is a facility organization based out in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 307 authors who have published 1021 publications receiving 18848 citations.

Primary Education as a Fundamental Right: Cost Implications

Abstract: In an attempt to attain the goal of universal primary education, many developing country governments, including India, have abolished official fees in primary education. The 86th amendment to the Indian Constitution made free and compulsory education a fundamental right for all children in the age group 6-14 years. There are other direct and indirect costs that can deter children from going to school. In this paper, using a rich nationwide data set, the authors construct the incompressible direct costs of attending primary school in India. After controlling for the opportunity cost of going to school (as proxied by the ratio of children's wages to adult's wages), it is found that the direct costs of education adversely affect the probability of children going to school, more so for children from poorer households. The results show that relative to boys, girls are more likely to be affected by the direct costs of schooling. The authors show that making primary education completely free will not increase the attendance rates to 100 per cent. They find that the government will have to incur an additional minimum expenditure of over Rs 2,900 crore every year in order to defray the basic or incompressible cost of attending school.

Road Transport Infrastructure and Economic Growth in India

Abstract: Creation of road transport infrastructure, through its direct and indirect effects, has a bearing on sustainability of growth and overall development of a country. It provides knowledge spillovers resulting from the whole agglomerated area via network dynamic externalities. The models based on cost or production function that incorporate infrastructure but simply assume a positive effect are no longer satisfactory to take to the data, because they ignore any feedback effect. In this article, therefore, we have twin objectives: first, we examine whether road transport infrastructure has a long-run equilibrium relationship with the macroeconomic variables such as output, employment and gross private capital formation or not. Second, we use vector autoregression (VAR) approach to analyse the impact of road transport infrastructure on macroeconomic variables. The elasticities that are estimated in the VAR model differ from the production function elasticities, as they incorporate feedback effect between the v...

Examining Environmental Kuznets Curve for river effluents in India

Abstract: This study aims to determine the trade-off between river pollution and the growth of the economy in the context of India using the concept of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). According to EKC theory, environmental pressure tends to rise faster than income growth in the early stages of economic development and then declines in the later stages with further economic growth. The present study has used the cross-sectional time series data for river pollutants of Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Dissolved Hydrogen Ions (PH) across various states of India for the period 1990–1991 to 2005–2006. This study shows why the conventional EKC model is not sufficient to ascertain the declining path of pollution as the economy grows in the second stage. The paper uses the modified EKC theory where the EKC curve is proposed to have 2 turning points. Our results indicated ‘tilted-S shaped’ relationship which contradicts EKC in the early stages. Most of the regions that were studied have crossed the first turning point but are still to cross the second turning point, which means that there will be an ascent in the pollution level in the future. This calls for more stringent environment policies complementing the desired growth path.

Gender Inequalities in Tasks and Instruction Opportunities within Indian Families

Abstract: This contribution uses the Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS 1999) to document gender inequalities in tasks in India and their impact on an important aspect of inequality of opportunity – the resources invested in the education of children. It examines the school attendance of Indian children and the probability that they receive informal instruction or assistance with learning at home. The analysis documents clear gender inequalities in the allocation of household tasks among girls and boys and their parents, but finds more mixed evidence regarding gender favoritism in human capital investment. As children living in rural areas grow older, school attendance falls off much more rapidly for girls than for boys; but in urban areas, attendance of boys and girls remains essentially similar. The paper estimates a household fixed-effects model of the probability that a child receives informal instruction at home, and finds no evidence of gender-based discrimination.

A Conceptual framework for development of sustainable development indicators

Abstract: There was a boom in the development of sustainable development indicators (SDIs) after notion of sustainability became popular through Bruntland Commission's report. Since then numerous efforts have been made worldwide in constructing SDIs at global, national and local scales, but in India not a single city has registered any initiative for indicator development . Motivated by this dearth of studies added to the prevailing sustainability risks in million plus cities in India, a research is being undertaken at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development and Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, India, to develop a set of sustainable indicators to study the resource dynamics of the city of Mumbai. As a first step in the process, the ground for development of SDIs is prepared through the development of a framework. A multi-view black box (MVBB) framework has been constructed by eliminating the system component from the extended urban metabolism model (EUMM) and introducing three-dimensional views of economic efficiency (EE), social wellbeing (SW), and ecological acceptability (EA). Domain-based classification was adopted to facilitate a scientifically credible set of indicators. The important domain areas are identified and applying MVBB framework, a model has been developed for each domain.