In "Bowling Alone," Putnam (1995) famously argued that the rise of television may be responsible for social capital's decline. I investigate this hypothesis in the context of Indonesian villages. To identify the impact of exposure to television (and radio), I exploit plausibly exogenous...

The report reviews the status and performance of agriculture, especially during the last two decades, and also presents what could be the way forward, given our objectives of accelerated growth, inclusiveness and the reducing of poverty and hunger. [Ministry of Agriculture Report]....

This report is prepared on the basis of a 5-day visit to the flood affected parts of Bihar, caused by the changing of the course of the river, Kosi, by a four-member team from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The team visited three districts of Saharsa, Supaul and Madhepura during the...

This paper draws on the experiences of the Far East Economic Crisis in 1998 and argues that: (1) the poor depended heavily on bonding social capital during the Crisis, but the crunch-point beyond which they felt no longer able to rely on this is less certain; (2) bridging social capital could...

Modern epidemiology has, by and large, been based on a narrow model of biomedicine and behaviour modification. It fails to answer, for instance the following questions: Why certain populations are inflicted with certain kinds of disease, and why the access to its cure and prevention is so...

This paper shows that the realization of Singapore’s vision of “active citizenship†and “state-society partnershipâ€, to a significant extent, depends on how social capital is being created and renewed in Singapore’s evolving political landscape.[Working Paper 9]