The paradox of declining fertility and declining contraceptive use in India: An artefact of survey design?

•Ensuring data quality in large scale surveys is challenging.•The trend and pattern of declining fertility and declining contraceptive use in India is puzzling.•Interview privacy setting and interviewer effect can partially explain the anomaly.•Large scale surveys impose severe demands on survey supervision and ability to ensure privacy.•Innovative ways of data collection for sensitive issues can be explored for proper reporting.

Lack of access to clean fuel and piped water and children's educational outcomes in rural India.

Investments in clean fuel and piped water are often recommended in developing countries on health grounds. This paper examines an alternative channel, the relationship between piped water and access to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and children's educational outcomes. Results based on the second round of the India Human Development Survey (2011-12) for rural India show that children aged 6-14 years, living in households that rely on free collection of water and cooking fuel, have lower mathematics scores and benefit from lower educational expenditures than children living in households that do not collect water and fuel. Moreover, gender inequality in this unpaid work burden also matters. In households where the burden of collection is disproportionately borne by women, child outcomes are significantly lower, particularly for boys. The endogeneity of choice to collect or purchase water and cooking fuel are modeled via Heckman selection and the entropy balancing method.

Male out-migration and the health of left-behind wives in India: The roles of remittances, household responsibilities, and autonomy.

In developing countries, labor out-migration has led to millions of married couples living apart from each other. Male out-migration brings economic benefits to the families in places of origin, but also leads to profound changes in the lives of the left-behind wives. It is unclear how the husband's out-migration influences the health of wives, let alone the mechanisms through which any effects are transmitted. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey (2004-2005 and 2011-2012), we estimated lagged dependent variable models (N = 19,737) to assess the health impact of husbands' out-migration for women in India. The results showed that left-behind wives had lower self-rated health than wives of non-migrants. Part of this negative health impact was driven by the low remittances sent by the migrant husbands. For both women in nuclear families and women in extended families, the negative health impact was partially attributable to women's added responsibilities, such as animal care and managing a bank account. For women in nuclear families, the negative health effect of husbands' migration has been partially suppressed by women's increased autonomy.

Precarity in a Time of Uncertainty: Gendered Employment Patterns during the Covid-19 Lockdown in India.

India implemented one of the world's most stringent lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper examines whether the impacts of the lockdown on employment differed by gender in areas surrounding Delhi. An ongoing monthly employment survey between March 2019 and May 2020 allows for comparison in employment before and after the lockdown. Estimates based on random-effects logistic regression models show that for men, the predicted probability of employment declined from 0.88 to 0.57, while that for women fell from 0.34 to 0.22. Women's concentration in self-employment may be one of the reasons why women's employment was somewhat protected. However, when we look only at wage workers, we find that women experienced greater job losses than men with predicted employment probability for wage employment for men declining by 40 percent compared to 72 percent for women.

Fathers' Migration and Nutritional Status of Children in India: Do the Effects Vary by Community Context?

BACKGROUND: Due to international and internal migration, millions of children in developing countries are geographically separated from one or both of their parents. Prior research has not reached a consensus on the impacts of parental out-migration on children's growth, and little is known about how community contexts modify the impact of parental out-migration. OBJECTIVE: We aim to assess the overall impacts of fathers' previous and current migration experiences on children's nutritional status in India and how the impacts are shaped by community socioeconomic contexts and community gender norms. METHODS: Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey collected in 2011-2012, we estimated community fixed-effect regression models predicting the nutritional status of children (ages 10-15) and examined the interactions among fathers' migration, child's gender, and community contexts. RESULTS: The results showed that children of returned migrants had lower height and Body Mass Index (BMI) than children of non-migrants. Fathers' current absence was associated with lower height and BMI for adolescents in communities with high levels of socioeconomic development but not for those in communities with low levels of development. Fathers' current absence due to migration was especially harmful for girls in communities with strict norms of female seclusion. CONTRIBUTION: Our findings highlight that the effects of father's out-migration on children are conditioned by the level of communities' socioeconomic development and community gender contexts, which helps to reconcile the previously mixed findings on the effects of parental migration on child outcomes.

Gender inequalities and household fuel choice in India.

The use of solid cooking fuels-wood, straw, crop residue, and cow-dung cakes-is associated with higher levels of environmental pollution and health burden. However, even in an era when incomes have grown and poverty has declined, the proportion of Indian households using clean cooking fuels such as kerosene or Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) has increased only slightly. Even among the wealthiest quintile, only about 40 percent of the households rely solely on clean fuel. Since the chores of cooking and collection of fuel remain primarily the domain of women, we argue that intra-household gender inequalities play an important role in shaping the household decision to invest in clean fuel. Analyses using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), a panel survey of over 41,000 households conducted in two waves in 2004-05 and 2011-12, respectively, show that women's access to salaried work and control over household expenditure decisions is associated with the use of clean fuel.

The Emergence of Educational Hypogamy in India.

With rising education among women across the world, educational hypergamy (women marrying men with higher education) has decreased over the last few decades in both developed and developing countries. Although a decrease in hypergamy is often accompanied by increasing homogamy (women marrying men with equal levels of education), our analyses for India based on a nationally representative survey of India (the India Human Development Survey), document a considerable rise in hypogamy (women marrying partners with lower education) during the past four decades. Log-linear analyses further reveal that declining hypergamy is largely generated by the rise in education levels, whereas hypogamous marriages continue to increase even after marginal distributions are taken into account. Further multivariate analyses show that highly educated women tend to marry men with lower education but from more privileged families. Moreover, consanguineous marriages, which exemplify strong cultural constraints on spousal selection in certain parts of India, are more likely to be hypogamous than marriages not related by blood. We argue that the rise in hypogamous marriage by education paradoxically reflects deep-rooted gender scripts in India given that other salient social boundaries are much more difficult to cross.

Physical versus Imagined Communities: Migration and Women's Autonomy in India.

India has about 400 million internal migrants (UNESCO 2013). The proportion of permanent internal migrants in India has risen between 1983 and 2007-08, and much of this increase is attributed to female marriage migrants. However, there is limited literature analyzing the well-being of female marriage migrants in India. This paper seeks to examine whether women's autonomy in the public sphere is a function of: a) the geographical community where the woman resides, or b) imagined communities (the mindset of the communities to which the woman's family belongs), using multilevel mixed-effects logistic and ordered logistic regression. Analyzing data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), 2012, for more than 34,000 ever-married women aged 15-49 years, the study finds that the communities in the mind (norms about marriage migration in the caste/sub-caste to which the woman's family belongs) are more important than the physical communities to which the women have migrated, in relation to certain aspects of women's physical autonomy and autonomy to participate in civic activities. In contrast, a woman's economic autonomy is a function of both 'imagined' and 'physical' communities. Thus, the opportunities available to women who migrate for marriage are shaped by both geographical communities, and more importantly, by the norms in her community about marriage migration.

The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India.

Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low and they are much less likely than men to work in the non-farm sector. Earlier research explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004-05 and 2011-12, we examine how village transportation infrastructure affects women's and men's agricultural and non-agricultural employment. Results from fixed-effect analysis show that access by paved or unpaved roads and frequent bus services increase the odds of non-agricultural employment among both males and females. The effect of road access on non-farm employment (relative to not-working) is stronger among women than among men. Improved transportation infrastructure has a stronger positive effect on women's non-farm employment in communities with more egalitarian gender norms.

The Paradox of Declining Female Work Participation in an Era of Economic Growth.

The past three decades have seen the advent of major transformations in the Indian economy. The economy has achieved average growth rates of 5-9 per cent, education has risen sharply for both men and women, fertility rates have declined, and infrastructure facilities, particularly access to electricity, cooking gas and piped water, have improved. All these factors are expected to reduce the demand for women's time spent in domestic chores and increase their opportunities for paid work. Paradoxically, however, the National Sample Surveys document a substantial decline in women's Work Participation Rates (WPRs), particularly for rural women. Optimistic interpretation of these trends suggests that increasing prosperity accounts for women's labour force withdrawal. For young women, rising school and college enrolment is incompatible with demands of the workforce. For both young and older women, rising prosperity allows for withdrawal from economic activities to focus on domestic duties. Pessimistic interpretations of these trends suggest that it is absence of suitable jobs rather than women's withdrawal from the labour force that accounts for declining female work participation. A third explanation focuses on increasing measurement errors in work participation data from the National Sample Surveys. This paper examines these diverse explanations using data from National Sample Surveys and India Human Development Surveys for 2004-5 and 2011-12 and finds that: (1) Decline in rural women's work participation recorded by National Sample Surveys may be overstated; (2) Supply factors explain a relatively small proportion of the decline in women's work participation rates; (3) Public policies such as improvement and transportation facilities and MGNREGS that enhance work opportunities for women are associated with increased participation by women in the work force.

Mothers' work patterns and Children's cognitive achievement: Evidence from the India Human Development survey.

As female labor force participation increases globally, the relationship between maternal employment and children's development remains unclear. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (2005), we investigate the link between maternal employment and children's arithmetic and reading achievement. We develop a work pattern typology that goes beyond standard measures of employment and captures work intensity and its compatibility with child-rearing in a transitional economy. We find that the relationship between maternal employment and children's outcomes is not unidimensional. For example, children of self-employed mothers are not disadvantaged compared to those with stay-at-home mothers, but maternal employment in salaried jobs or wage work outside the home is negatively associated with cognitive skills in children. However, this negative association is reversed at higher levels of maternal education, suggesting greater access to resources and flexibility associated with better jobs mitigate the negative aspects of maternal employment posed by time constraints. Additionally, maternal employment is associated with maternal involvement in schoolwork and financial investment in academic activities, providing evidence that both time and resources devoted to children's education are significant.

Economic Status and Adult Mortality in India: Is the Relationship Sensitive to Choice of Indicators?

Research on economic status and adult mortality is often stymied by the reciprocity of this relationship and lack of clarity on which aspect of economic status matters. While financial resources increase access to healthcare and nutrition and reduce mortality, sickness also reduces labor force participation, thereby reducing income. Without longitudinal data, it is difficult to study the linkage between economic status and mortality. Using data from a national sample of 132,116 Indian adults aged 15 years and above, this paper examines their likelihood of death between wave 1 of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), conducted in 2004-2005 and wave 2, conducted in 2011-2012. The results show that mortality between the two waves is strongly linked to the economic status of the household at wave 1 regardless of the choice of indicator for economic status. However, negative relationship between economic status and mortality for individuals already suffering from cardiovascular and metabolic conditions varies between three markers of economic status - income, consumption and ownership of consumer durables - varies, reflecting two-way relationship between short and long term markers of economic status and morbidity.

INDIAN PARADOX: RISING EDUCATION, DECLINING WOMENS' EMPLOYMENT.

BACKGROUND: Theories of human capital would suggest that with more education, women acquire greater skills and their earnings increase, resulting in higher labor force participation. However, it has been long known that in India, women's education has a U-shaped relationship with labor force participation. Part of the decline at moderate levels of education may be due to an income effect whereby women with more education marry into richer families that enable them to withdraw from the labor force. OBJECTIVE: The paper uses the first comprehensive Indian income data to evaluate whether the other family income effect explains the negative relationship between moderate women's education and their labor force participation. METHODS: Using two waves of the India Human Development Survey, a comprehensive measure of labor force participation is regressed on educational levels for currently married women, 25-59. RESULTS: We find a strong other family income effect that explains some but not all of the U-shape education relationship. Further analyses suggest the importance of a lack of suitable employment opportunities for moderately educated women. CONCLUSION: Other factors need to be identified to explain the paradoxical U-shape relationship. We suggest the importance of occupational sex segregation, which excludes moderately educated Indian women from clerical and sales jobs. CONTRIBUTION: This paper provides a more definitive test of the other family income effect and identifies new directions for future research that might explain the paradoxical U-curve relationship.

Escaping and Falling into Poverty in India Today.

The study examines the dynamic nature of movements into and out of poverty over a period when poverty has fallen substantially in India. The analysis identifies people who escaped poverty and those who fell into it over the period 2005 to 2012. The analysis identifies people who escaped poverty and those who fell into it over the period 2005 to 2012. Using panel data from the India Human Development Survey for 2005 and 2012, we find that the risks of marginalized communities such as Dalits and Adivasis of falling into or remaining in poverty were higher than those for more privileged groups. Some, but not all of these higher risks are explained by educational, financial, and social disadvantages of these groups in 2005. Results from a logistic regression show that some factors that help people escape poverty differ from those that push people into it and that the strength of their effects varies.

Getting a Child Through Secondary School and To College in India: The Role of Household Social Capital.

In the classic formulations of social capital theory, families employ their social capital resources to enhance other capitals, in particular their human capital investments. Social capital would seem to be especially important in the case of India where, in recent years, higher education has been under considerable stress with rising educational demand, inadequate supply, and little parental experience to guide their children's transition through the education system. We use the 2005 and 2012 waves of the nationally representative India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to show how relatively high status connections advantage some families' chances of their children reaching educational milestones such as secondary school completion and college entry. The 2005 IHDS survey measure of a household's formal sector contacts in education, government, and health predicts their children's educational achievements by the second wave, seven years later, controlling for households' and children's initial backgrounds.

Hopes, Dreams and Anxieties: India's One-Child Families.

While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle classes, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004-2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child. We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition.

Enhancing Nutrition Security via India's National Food Security Act: Using an Axe instead of a Scalpel?

In September 2013, India passed a historic National Food Security Act. This paper examines the potential impact of the two central pillars of this act - expansion of the Public Distribution System and strengthening of the Integrated Child Development Schemes - on child nutrition. Using new data from the India Human Development Survey of 2011-12, this paper shows that access to subsidized grains via PDS is not related to improved child nutrition, and while ICDS seems to be related to lower child undernutrition, it has a limited reach in spite of the universalization of the program. The paper suggests that a tiered strategy in dealing with child undernutrition that starts with the identification of undernourished children and districts and follows through with different strategies for dealing with severe, acute malnutrition, followed by a focus on moderate malnutrition, could be more effective than the existing focus on cereal distribution rooted in the NFSA.

Muslim and Hindu Women's public and private behaviors: gender, family, and communalized politics in India.

Prior research on fundamentalist religious movements has focused attention on the complicated relationship among gender, family, and religion. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 30,000 Hindu and Muslim women, this study compares the daily public and private behaviors of women in India to examine how gender and family norms are shaped in the context of communalized identity politics. Building on the theoretical framework of "doing gender," we argue that because communal identities are expressed through externally visible behaviors, greater religious differences are expected in external markers of gendered behaviors and family norms. Results indicate that Muslim women are more likely to engage in veiling and less likely to venture outside the home for recreation and employment. However, religious differences are absent when attention is directed at private behaviors, such as household decision-making power, gender segregation within households, and discrimination against daughters. Results underscore the multidimensionality of gender.