• “The Urgency of Skilling India’s Workforce” (with Girish Bahal)

Skilling India- No time to Lose: Link

This chapter investigates the urgency of skilling India’s workforce and, in the process, lays down a foundation for a deeper understanding of what’s needed to skill the Indian workforce. In other words, it chalks out the various challenges in terms of analysing what’s required to skill, upskill and reskill India’s workforce in the short, medium and long run. In the subsequent chapters, the Skilling India report focusses on how skills are being acquired and imparted, how they are being matched and adjusted to jobs and, looking to the future, how they are being anticipated and adapted. Acquiring, matching and anticipating are the three central themes of the skills report, with each chapter recommending a set of policies or actions for policymakers, workers and enterprises to come together effectively to realise India’s tremendous jobs and skilling potential.

Media Mentions: The Hindu BusinessLine, Business Standard


  • “Structural Transformation of Jobs from Manufacturing to Services: Will it Work for India?” (with Abhinav Narayanan and Bhanu Pratap)

Margin - The Journal of Applied Economic Research: Forthcoming

India has struggled with the question of what to make in India – manufacturing or services. The Economic Survey 2014-15 articulated that this was a false choice. Instead India faced a choice between two disparate types of sectors, unskilled-intensive and skilled-intensive, in both of which India possessed a comparative advantage. Two years down the line, the Economic Survey 2016-17 suggested that labour-intensive sectors may be more effective in addressing India’s job challenge. The World Economic Outlook Report (WEO, 2018) has suggested that a rapid replacement in the share of manufacturing jobs by services is likely to have a welfare-enhancing effect on developed and developing economies alike. As the Economic Survey 2014-15 suggested that this is both a positive and a policy question. This paper re-examines this question of manufacturing versus services in the Indian context to contribute to this debate. Specifically, we use the KLEMS India dataset to examine the dynamics of labour productivity associated with (i) a steady shift in the composition of the workforce towards the services sector, and (ii) investment in human capital proxied by changes in the labour quality index. Contrary to the WEO’s policy prescription, our findings suggest that an increasing prevalence of informal job contracts in services could potentially weaken the positive relationship between labour quality and labour productivity. Additionally, we observe that India’s labour force seems to be rapidly shifting towards services sub-sectors with lower productivity. This mechanism is likely to obstruct any potential gains in productivity, associated with an optimal relocation of factors of production.


  • “Nowcasting GDP growth using a Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) for India” (with Saurabh Ghosh and Pankaj Kumar)

Reserve Bank of India WP: Link

Design a high-frequency indicator selection process, ensuring that the DFs provide a real time assessment of the state of the economy; help identify sectors that are contributing to economic fluctuations; improve out-of-sample performance of the model, especially its ability to handle jagged-edge data reflecting the non-synchronous nature of data releases in India; GDP growth nowcasts are presented to the RBI’s top management as part of the bi-monthly Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meetings

Media Mentions - Bloomberg Quint, Business Standard, Central Banking, The Economic Times


  • “'Nowcasting' the Indian economy: A new approach to know the now-GDP” (with Sanjib Pohit)

Ideas for India: Link


  • “A New Approach to Nowcasting Indian Gross Value Added” (with Robert Beyer and Sanjib Pohit)

National Council of Applied Economic Research WP: Link

In India, quarterly growth of Gross Value Added (GVA) is published with a large lag and nowcasts are exacerbated by data challenges typically faced by emerging market economies, such as big data revisions, mixed frequencies data publication, small sample size, non-synchronous nature of data releases, and data releases with varying lags. This paper presents a new framework to nowcast India’s GVA that incorporates information of mixed data frequencies and other data characteristics. In addition, evening-hour luminosity has been added as a crucial high-frequency indicator. Changes in nightlight intensity contain information about economic activity, especially in countries with a large informal sector and significant data challenges, including in India. The framework for the ‘trade, hotels, transport, communication and services related to broadcasting’ bloc of the Indian GVA has been illustrated in this paper.