The Journey

I am a social demographer with strong interests in social inequalities in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. I study inequalities in education, employment and maternal and child health outcomes by locating them within the political economy of the region. While much of my research focuses on South Asia, I have also engaged in comparative studies across Asia, Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa. I have published articles in a wide range of sociological and demographic journals including Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, Population and Development Review and Feminist Studies. I am currently examining changes in the nature and composition of Indian middle classes in the context of India’s movement from state-capitalism to market-capitalism and increasing involvement in the global economy.

I began my career using secondary data and never expected to get into the business of data collection. However, over time I began to feel that demographic and economic data that was easily available created a straitjacket that did not allow me to address the kind of questions that I was most interested in. Fortuitously I found partners and funders who were willing to take a chance and jump off the cliff with me into the uncharted territory of large data collection that blended demographic and economic questions with sociological imagination. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) a survey of over 41,000 households was born in 2003 in collaboration with Reeve Vanneman and colleagues from National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi with initial funding from the National Institute of Health. The IHDS has now morphed into India’s only longitudinal dataset that covers all ages and regions. The number of collaborators has expanded and the data are now being used by over 9,000 users.

Experience with IHDS has also led to increasing engagement with developing better methods of data collection through NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) and translating feminist insights into data as a part of a program with Feinian Chen and Amy McLaughlin called Women’s Empowerment: Data for Gender Equality (WEDGE).