This project is inspired by Karl Polanyi’s essay, Aristotle discovers the Economy. Polanyi shows that market economies have evolved as a historical process where States have constituted institutions of governance and regulation and have since, withdrawn from economic activities —thus, making way for markets. The process is a ‘double movement’ of the takeover of common and public resources by private players accompanied by counter movements of parochialism, relativism as well as emancipatory movements such as ecofeminism, socialism etc. We will apply this understanding to India’s experience with neoliberal policies in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

This project is a deep-dive into India’s experience with creating and collecting data. We inquire whether collecting and analyzing data simply provides an objective analysis of the Indian economy or whether the process of data collection foregrounds certain narratives and 'invisiblizes' others.

This project will look at publicly available datasets such as Periodic Labour Force Survey data or Time Use Data to inquire into questions of caste and gender. Through this we will try to identify the doubly disadvantaged groups with respect to the labour market outcomes in terms of both employment and earnings.

Recent reports by rating agencies and international organizations suggest India to be one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world, aided by prudent macroeconomic policies. Nonetheless, the economy faces global headwinds, including a global growth slowdown in an increasingly fragmented world. Another area of concern stems from the rising debt levels in India. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has cautioned that India’s general government debt may exceed 100% of its gross domestic product (GDP) in the medium term (IMF 2023).The study will capture the nature and consequences of the rising debt levels in the economy. It envisages exploring the broad trends and changes in the nature and composition of India's debt. It will also investigate the potential implications arising from the rising debt level, taking cues from the dynamics stated. This research will investigate issues pertaining to the financial stability of the Indian macroeconomy and draw insights from a regulatory and policy perspective, which can potentially shape India's experience in dealing with debt.

The Government of India (GoI) released its long awaited results of consumption expenditure survey in the form of a 27-page factsheet in an uncharacteristic Saturday evening press release (Feb. 24, 2024). Since its release, it has attracted attention from policymakers, public intellectuals, and economists. There have been a few methodological changes, both sampling and non-sapling ones, which are expected to change its comparability with earlier such surveys, notable of 2011-12. We are working towards gaining a deeper understanding of this survey results, compared with earlier rounds (2011-12 and 2004-05). We are working towards comparability of surveys, rural-urban changes in comparison, and how does household consumption estimate compare with national account estimates. Various new questions could be asked, with the arrival of unit-level data.

In this study we attempt to quantify the effect of terrorism on economic activities in the erstwhile Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. The most crucial problem in any such study is of finding a counterfactual. The practice, generally, has been to compare the affected state/region with carefully chosen comparison unit based on Mill’s method of difference. But a single comparison group has the problem of its own, in addition to choosing that one comparator. We intend to create a synthetic control group based on a weighted average of other states. This method has the advantage of being free from the subjectivity of researchers, as the choice of control states and weights assigned to them is data drive.

Drawing on the three decades of All India Debt & Investment Survey (AIDIS) dataset, we attempt to map the drivers of wealth inequality across caste, class and region in India. While studies have examined patterns of inequality in household consumer expenditure, incomes, and wages, wealth inequality particularly of its driving factors has not received much attention, especially during the high economic growth period since the 1990s. We plan to use decomposition and/or regression analysis to understand the evolution of different components of wealth contributing to overall wealth inequality in India.

As part of the project, we are trying to unpack the broad trends in the Indian labour market at the all-India level. Even as the overall, all-India levels and trends are important in themself, the numbers often tend to hide more than they reveal. We focus on different dimensions of household and individual identities to gauge the long-term patterns emerging over time - both in employment and earnings.