Rohini Somanathan is Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, public economics and political economy.
A major strand in her research explores mechanisms through which public institutions and community behavior influence patterns of mobility and group inequality. This includes work on the politics of caste identities in India and racial segregation in the United States.
Afridi, Barooah and Somanathan use the exogenous policy shock of the extension of provision of school meals to upper primary grades in public schools in Delhi to study the effects of school meal intake on the cognitive effort of students within the classroom. Using individual level data on the performance of students in effort games both before and after the extension of the programme, the researchers find that the provision of meals significantly improved the classroom effort of students in grade seven.
Mandated fuel regulation for public vehicles has been a leading instrument used in many south Asian cities to reduce pollution and improve urban air quality. In India, the trend was set in 2001 when the Supreme Court ruled that all buses, taxis and auto-rickshaws in the capital New Delhi must run on compressed natural gas (CNG). Under the court’s directive, similar regulatory initiatives were set in motion in several other medium and large Indian cities.
Affirmative Action policies have been at the centre of debates on social justice for many decades. In India, within the broader debate surrounding affirmative action for the Scheduled Castes, an especially contentious issue has been that of the sub-division of the Scheduled Castes into smaller groupings for targeted transfers.
Indian poverty measures rely on consumer expenditure data collected by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSS). The poverty lines based on these data have made no attempt to incorporate variations in access to basic public services, such as education and health care. While the Constitution of India states that education and health care are expected to be provided to every citizen for free, this is very far from true and there are differences in access among even the poorest households in the country.
You have not yet added any items to your reading list. Add articles by clicking on the Reading List button on content pages.
