Papers

Paper submitted as a part of coursework in a master's level course on Labour Economics. 

• I find that PMKISAN improved Female Labour Force Participation Rates by 1.5 percentage points. 

• I find that the increase in FLFP was a result of two opposing effects of PMKISAN: 

  • Women are "called back" into their homes, owing to a reduced need to work under an income transfer scheme, reducing FLFP.

  • PMKISAN improved investment in agriculture, shifting women to work on their own farm, compared to performing domestic duties only. 

Published in Indian School of Public Policy's flagship journal (Feb 2022). 

• I argue that the then Farm Laws that sought to liberalise the Indian agricultural sector may have unintended consequences on freedoms that people have reason to value. 

• I show possible ways the Farm Laws could have adversely affected the autonomy of women farmers and decisions to spend on social occasions. 

This paper was written as a part of a course in Understanding Development, and was later submitted to ISPP Policy Review. 

Paper submitted as coursework in Health Economics by Prof. Aparajita Dasgupta. 

• I scrape data from the Indian Medical Register (IMR) and analyse medical career choices of 1.2 million registered doctors in India. 

• I find that while female students are less likely on average to undertake a Masters in Surgery (MS), females from the poorest districts are more likely to undertake an MS degree, strongly rejecting the notion that all females do nor prefer undertaking surgical degrees. 

I plan to take this paper ahead and analyse migration patterns for doctor education in India. 

Paper written with Nandini Krishnan for course in Development Economics with Prof. Hemanshu Kumar. 

• While significant literature exists on the positive impact of female leaders in local governance structures, we focus on the impact of having two females leaders working together at different levels of local governance.

• We find that individually, a female gram sarpanch and a female water samiti chairperson improve implementation of a female centric outcome - tapped drinking water supply. 

• Jointly, female sarpanch's and water samiti chairpersons do not worsen implementation. This strongly rejects the idea that females working together worsen developmental outcomes. 

This paper won the first prize at a paper presentation competition at Hansraj College, Delhi University.