Bearing witness to our times.
Providing data for social change.
Sonalde Desai
Thank you for visiting my personal website. I am a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland College Park. I hold a joint appointment at the National Council of Applied Economic Research New Delhi where I direct the NCAER National Data Innovation Centre. Views on this website are personal.
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”
— Mark Twain
Evidence for social action.
My parents were part of the Indian Independence movement and I grew up in the shadows of their social activism, first in a very small town in Gujarat and then in Mumbai India. I felt like I had found heaven when I realized that I could do what I love most, trying to understand the processes that shape our world and playing around with data, and yet contribute, at least peripherally, to social action and policy dialogue.
India Human Development Survey (IHDS)
India Human Development Survey (IHDS) is a large nationwide panel survey of over 41,000 households covering all parts of urban and rural India. The IHDS surveys were carried out in 2004-5 and 2011-12 with about 83% of the households from Wave 1 being interviewed in Wave 2. Wave 3 is planned for 2020-22. The IHDS data are in the public domain and used by over 9,000 users worldwide. They have generated over 500 papers and dissertations and been referenced in over 400 newspaper articles.
NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC)
National Council of Applied Economic Research New Delhi (NCAER) with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan, has recently set up a new National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC). The main objective of NCAER-NDIC is to serve as a laboratory for experiments in data collection, interfacing with partners in think tanks, Indian and international universities, and government. I serve as its founding director.
Women’s Empowerment: Data for Gender Equality
WEDGE is a project I am leading with Feinian Chen to develop survey-based measurement of women’s economic empowerment. Enhancing women’s economic empowerment is a core goal of Sustainable Development Goals requiring the development of appropriate measurement tools to track progress. This project will develop measures of women’s economic empowerment that can be easily incorporated in national surveys and test their reliability and validity. These modules will be placed in the public domain for use by the scientific community. The project will: (1) Curate existing statistical data on women’s economic empowerment across different countries and its close correlates in the area of educational, social and political empowerment; (2) Develop and pretest scalable survey modules and place these modules in the public domain for possible adoption by statistical agencies and researchers; and, (3) Facilitate the creation of a community of researchers, program implementers and data collectors working on women’s economic empowerment using web-based platforms around methodological issues involved in measuring empowerment.
Contact
You can find me by typing my first name [dot] last name [at] gmail [dot] com