This essay summarises the broad contours and key characteristics of the Indian government’s social policy response to the global Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing nationwide lockdown. The principal strategy of the Indian government was to implement a large and at times bewildering array of...

"Since the early 1990s, several states in India have introduced financial incentive programs to discourage son preference among parents and encourage investment in daughters' education and health. This study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana, Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughter,...

Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labour is prevalent. Even if many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children's welfare, in theory their impact on child labour is undetermined. This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the...

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are an increasingly popular tool for incentivizing behavior. This paper evaluates impact of one of the largest CCTs in the world, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) in India, on institutional deliveries. Maternal mortality is high in India and JSY aims to reduce it by...

This paper examines the effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, currently the world's largest public employment program, on household consumption and poverty rates in rural India. Combining regionally coded data from consumption surveys with information on the...