Working Papers
Constituencies of Change: Electoral Redistricting and Public Goods Provision in India (JMP)
India has long used political quotas to improve representation and service access for disadvantaged groups such as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Muslims, however, despite being a large and underdeveloped minority, are constitutionally excluded from such reservations. This paper explores whether electoral redistricting, a historically identity-neutral process in India, can serve as an alternative means of improving public service provision for marginalized minorities by increasing their concentration within constituencies. Leveraging the 2008 redistricting, I examine how shifts in Muslim concentration influence biases in service delivery in rural India. I construct a novel spatial dataset linking village-level maps, electoral boundaries, and public service records before and after delimitation. Redistricting altered the demographic composition of constituencies by raising or lowering Muslim voter shares. I find that high-Muslim villages in constituencies where the Muslim share increased saw significantly greater provision of public schools, a sector in which Muslims had previously faced disadvantage. No such effects are observed for services without prior bias, such as roads or electrification. These findings suggest that increasing political concentration can help redress existing inequalities in the allocation of public goods to minority communities.
A Ghetto of One’s Own: Communal Violence, Human Capital, and Occupational Mobility (with Aarushi Kalra)
Do minority communities respond to communal violence by investing in human capital to better integrate into mainstream economy or to build stronger, more independent and occupationally diverse enclaves? This paper studies the long-term effects of communal violence on educational attainment and occupational mobility among India’s Muslims minority. Exploiting spatial variation in exposure to the 1990 Ram Rath Yatra, a political campaign linked to a surge in anti-Muslim riots, we use a continuous difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal impact of violence on human capital formation. We document that in the long run, proximity to the yatra route, a strong predictor of communal violence, is positively associated with secondary educational attainment and occupational mobility among Muslims. We find that neighborhoods exposed to riots saw a significant increase in the number of private schools constructed in the post riot period, meaning that community-led rebuilding efforts played a key role in enhancing access to education. Moreover, we observe a shift away from traditional Muslim occupations toward more education-intensive occupations that require transferrable skills. We do not find evidence of a shift toward self-employment or employment for Muslim-owned firms. The findings suggest that these shifts in human capital investments are driven by an imperative to assimilate into a growing service-led economy rather than a push to form self-reliant isolated communities that may be necessary in the face of targeted violence.
Conflict and Gender Subjugation: The Impact of Religious Violence on Women’s Age at Marriage (with Sisir Debnath and Sourabh B. Paul)
Media Coverage: Ideas for India (Please note that these were preliminary results, the paper has more granular data now)
This paper studies how religious riots affect the age at marriage in India. Riots are positively correlated with crimes against women and may increase the search cost for a girl's parents who have the agency to find a suitable partner and are concerned about the safety of their daughter. To test our hypothesis empirically, we use an extended version of Varshney-Wilkinson dataset on riots and construct a pooled cross-section of women married between 1980 to 2000 using three rounds of the National Family Health Survey. Since riots are endogenous, we use an instrumental variable approach to isolate the causal impact of riots. We use the coincidence of major state Hindu festivals on a Friday, a weekly congregation prayer day for Muslims, as an instrument for riots in India. Our findings suggest that riots have a negative impact on women's age at marriage. The incidence of a riot in the year of marriage decreases the age of marriage by nine months for women. It also results in early motherhood and lower education outcomes for women. Our study motivates the need to provide rehabilitation measures in the form of safety infrastructure, income support and health services in the riot-affected areas.
Selected works in progress
Sansad's Stepson (with Taha Ibrahim)
Evolution of India’s Linguistic Landscape (with Maitreesh Ghatak)