Public projects are introduced by the government to help people. Canal placement from the dam is also one of the major public projects that shows a great increase in the farmer’s welfare and gross cultivated area. Given the constraint of geographical parameters, how does the government decide on the placement of canals in villages? We investigate the previous election outcomes are predicting the canal placement after controlling for all geographical variables. Investigating the data obtained from 224 villages of Gujarat under the command area of the canal, constituting 32 constituencies, using a decision tree, double ML IV, and a theoretical model. We find that the political party at the village level takes into account the public project placement in their election-winning strategies.

Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India, has approved a three-year project-JASHN (Joint Action for Sustainable Health and Nutrition), commencing from December 2020 in Jharkhand. The JASHN project is community-driven and owned which keeps the community at the very center of its interventions. The uniqueness of the project lies in the fact that through the method of peer counseling (peer to peer), the health, nutrition, and WASH knowledge would be disseminated at the community levels. It has been agreed that the VKPL at IRMA will provide end-to-end technical support to JSLPS in the implementation of JASHN using randomized control trial (RCT) methods. The collaboration will result in implementation innovations, identification of pathways and strategies using which the design of such interventions can be rendered more effective, impact evaluation, and cost-effectiveness analysis.

Policy-makers in developing countries have traditionally provided agricultural credit to small and marginal farmers under liberal terms and conditions. Recent survey results have shown that farmers end up utilizing large portions of such credit to fulfill their consumption needs. Hence, when credit is required for carrying out agricultural operations, farmers are less likely to receive formal credit and they turn to informal lenders and pay a much higher credit price. In addition, there is nothing inherent in the village environment that ensures the timely availability of credit. The combination of these processes results in poorer harvest and a crop portfolio in favor of less risky crops. The field experiment has been designed in consultation with a Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) and will be randomly assigned to 51 farmer producer organizations (FPOs) and will be carried out over three cropping seasons. The FPO and households will be surveyed at baseline, mid-line, end-line1, and end-line2, to estimate causal effects of closed-loop credit on-farm outcomes (for example, share of land area under risky crop, crop diversity, and farm income) and their persistence. The experiment is mounted at the FPO level given the recent policy push to strengthen such organizations for linking farmers with input and output markets. Therefore, the closed-loop credit product allocated at the FPO level will provide a scalable solution. The Pre-Analysis Plan for this study is currently in progress. 

This is a follow-up study done previously in 2016. The question of our interest is what is the impact of the largest livelihood program on household welfare? Also, to access the identification of program design features that can be strengthened further to support the efficient functioning of enterprises. This study is a panel study of 4362 households from 727 villages in 3 states of India. The NRLP was introduced in 2012 and implemented in different phases. Therefore, we lack the baseline data for the villages to check for the parallel trends. We try to solve this issue through a retrospective approach. Along with 1 the household panel, a new enterprise survey was introduced in this wave. In this survey, we try to capture the enterprise orientation of the entrepreneurs using vignettes in a survey experiment form in 4500 enterprises. 

The economic loss caused by the second wave of Covid-19 could have been mitigated through compliance with the Covid-19 safety measures, vaccinations, etc. Local governments that enjoy a higher level of trust could play a more proactive role. The question arises, why the local government officials did not do it? Whether they are not aware that this issue is falling in their mandate or do they lack technical details on best practices for COVID management? To answer these questions, we try to design a field experiment to be implemented in the 450 Panchayats from the 6 districts of Tamil Nadu. We aim to examine the extent to which the leader’s suggestions are complied with and if they affect households’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices regarding Covid-19. A baseline of households and local leaders is currently in progress 

A lot of work has been done in developing countries to mitigate the exploitation of farmers by traders and middle-man. The previous law abides the farmer to sell their produce in the mandi situated in a different state. We try to analyze the impact of relaxing the previous law on farmers’ farm income. The objective helps us to use the RDD approach. To account for the compliance, we use the fuzzy-RDD approach using data from 100 contiguous villages from 6 districts of Madhya Pradesh (M.P.) and Uttar Pradesh (U.P.). We randomly assigned 50 villages from the two states for which the nearest mandi lies in the same state in the treatment group, and 50 villages in the control group for which the nearest mandi lies on another side of the state. We observe in this study that the traders tend to seek more rent from the farmers whose nearest mandi lies outside the village. This paper is currently in progress, but we found a significant change in the farmers’ income in the treated group as compared to the control group 

Evidence from the vast literature suggests that the decision-making power of females in the household plays an important role to ameliorate household welfare. We analyze the impact of having a bank account and the channels it triggers, which improves the female’s decision-making power in the household. In this study, we utilized the data from the SEPRI (2016) and JPM (2016) for 12 districts of the Uttar Pradesh state and use the 3SLS approach in our analysis. We concluded in this study that a female owning a bank account increases her share of household decision-making by 33.8%. Therefore, it helps in reducing the vulnerability of the household to fall below the poverty line.