Research Interests
Primary: Political Economy, Ethnic Politics, Historical Sociology
Secondary: Education Policy, Policy Evaluation
Research Interests
Primary: Political Economy, Ethnic Politics, Historical Sociology
Secondary: Education Policy, Policy Evaluation
Published Papers
A micro-ethnographic study is done in a village using participatory research tools in order to highlight the patterns of public goods segregation and access. The factors influencing the social groups in their decision-making at the local level are also highlighted.
Working Papers
"Neighborhood Effects of Village Dominance on the Social and Mental Well-Being of Older Adults in India" - with Allen P Ugargol, Parul Puri
Caste-based discrimination is a ubiquitous social determinant of health inequities that emerges from rigid social structures that create and perpetuate hierarchies, segmentation, and segregation. The resulting social exclusion leads to inequalities and inequities in many domains, including health. Although the social gradient to health is well established, the role of social exclusion as a social determinant of health inequities is far less explored. As India undergoes significant demographic change, caste remains a birth-assigned attribute that has enormous social, cultural and economic implications for older adults, too. Using data from the LASI (2017-18) in India, we examine the prevalence and association of social exclusion with depression and well-being among older adults. Utilizing the OLS method, we model the differential effect of caste-based segregation on depressive symptoms and well-being across different social groups. Older adults living in fragmented villages exhibited significant diversity disadvantages and perceived higher neighbourhood discrimination. Lower-caste older adults, such as from the SC and ST categories, faced more discrimination in OBC-dominated villages, and older adults belonging to SC and OBC categories faced more discrimination in forward caste-dominated villages. Older males had a higher probability of being discriminated as compared to older females. Discriminated older adults tended to exhibit a higher incidence of depression — both perceived and diagnosed. The study highlights the adverse impact of social and economic exclusion arising from caste-based fragmentation and discrimination on the social and mental well-being of older adults and the need to address discrimination to ensure a just and equitable longevity society.
"Improving First-Generation College Students' Education and Employment Outcomes: Effect of a Targeted Scholarship Program" - with Soham Sahoo, working paper (2023)
First-generation college students, the first in their families to attend college and representing a growing segment in higher education, encounter unique aspirations and challenges. Despite their significance, there has been limited research and policy interventions on them. This study evaluates the First-Generation Graduate Scholarship (FGGS) scheme, launched in 2010 in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which waived tuition fees for first-generation college students pursuing engineering, medicine, and agriculture-related streams (i.e., "professional courses'") at the undergraduate level. Focusing on potential beneficiaries aged 17–22 years, we assess the program's impact on professional course enrollment, stream choice, and subsequent labour market outcomes. Using multiple rounds of the National Sample Survey and employing a Difference-in-Differences (DID) model, we find a 3.6 percentage point increase in professional course enrollment in response to the policy, translating to around 43% increase over the mean enrollment rate in professional courses. The treatment also significantly affects the beneficiaries' stream choice and graduate-degree completion rates in favour of professional courses. Various robustness checks, including synthetic-DID analysis, event studies, and placebo tests, affirm these findings. Beyond academic outcomes, we find that the policy led to a shift towards service-sector employment among FGGS beneficiaries, accompanied by reduced engagement in agriculture-related work, decreased casual employment, and an increased propensity for active job-seeking.
Ongoing Projects
"Multi-scalar Caste Segregation in Rural India", with Deepak Malghan
We use the pre-colonial Tamil literary canon, colonial land records, and papers from the colonial revenue administration archive to construct a history of the dialectical relationship between segregation patterns and the local agrarian political economy. Do historical modes of agrarian production help explain the spatial segregation of castes? How (if) did the colonial administration's land tenure and revenue interventions modify segregation patterns? How has this historical political economy of caste segregation influenced agrarian transformation in the post-colonial period? How does segregation intersect with networks of "reciprocal, nonsymmetrical rights and obligations" that modulate India's agrarian political economy? The dissertation chapter develops a historical narrative spanning nearly a millennium to sketch broad-brush answers to these questions. In the second part of the study, we use high-resolution spatial data for rural India to overcome the lack of sub-village level data availability (n=1,696,335 hamlets). By utilizing these datasets, we attempt to generate a detailed snapshot of intra-village segregation at the hamlet level in rural India.
"The Political Economy of Intra-Village Segregation" - with Deepak Malghan
We use a quantitative empirical framework to study the contemporary nexus between caste segregation, agrarian political economy, local public goods politics, and socio-economic inequities. Using meticulously obtained independent India's first-ever census of street-level public goods and street-level caste demography (covering every single rural habitation in Tamil Nadu), we study the political and economic consequences of intra-village segregation. Currently, the village is the highest resolution at which the political economy of public goods is studied. However, spatial inequality in public goods placements and access within a village is widely recognized as the most important locus of local public goods politics.