Own and Spillover Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program Targeting Young Girls: Evidence from India

My dissertation evaluates both own and spillover effects of a conditional cash transfer program targeting young girls. The first chapter evaluates the effects of an ongoing conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in India targeting young girls that provides incentives in the form of deferred cash payments, with eligibility at birth and the largest payment coming at age 21. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I exploit variation in exposure to LLY by birth cohort, state, and birth order to estimate the causal impact of the program on children’s health and educational outcomes, as well as the fertility behavior of parents. I find that the program significantly increased the likelihood of registering the births of daughters. However, the sex ratio at birth does not change, suggesting no change in female mortality. I find evidence of families having children faster and in turn reducing the birth spacing. However, parents are moving toward lower eventual family sizes as I find an increase in the likelihood of parents adopting sterilization. Finally, the results using math and reading test score data show some evidence of improvement in the education outcomes of daughters. Overall, I find that a financial incentive program plays a limited role in affecting the well-being of girls. The second chapter paper evaluates the spill-over effects of an ongoing conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in India on the ineligible older siblings living in the same households as the eligible beneficiary. Using difference-in-differences framework, I exploit variation in exposure to LLY by birth cohort, state, and birth order to estimate the spillover effect of the program on the ineligible older sibling's educational outcomes. I find that the program does not have any effect on the schooling outcomes of the ineligible siblings. I also find negative effect on the math and reading skills of the ineligible siblings of treated children relative to the children in families that received no treatment. The evidence suggests that this effect operates through the reallocation of resources away from the ineligible sibling towards the eligible sibling.Economics, Department o

Computer assisted learning versus conventional teaching: a questionnaire based study

Background: Animal experiments have ethical concerns thus practical sessions mean demonstration classes. Incorporation of novel teaching methods in pharmacology is the need of the hour when there is extensive use of computers among students. The present study was conducted to analyse and compare the knowledge gained by students through traditional demonstration lectures versus Computer assisted learning (CAL) sessions.Methods: This study was done on 112 second professional MBBS students after taking informed consent. They were divided in 2 groups viz. CAL group and Traditional teaching group and were taught experimental pharmacology topics using different teaching methods. The performance of the students in the two groups was then compared based on questionnaire. Student’s perception on use of CAL was also assessed.Results: A statistically significant difference in performance was seen among the students in the traditional teaching group and CAL group. In CAL group, the average scores for the Rabbit’s eye, Dog’s blood pressure, Animals used in Experimental Pharmacology and Screening methods sessions were 9.07, 8.3 and 3.8 respectively while in traditional teaching group the scores were 8.4, 7.8 and 3.4 respectively. Similarly, in frog’s heart session, CAL group scored higher (7.14) than traditional group (6.79). 76.8% students strongly agreed that CAL sessions were useful and 100% students strongly agreed that traditional lectures are difficult to retain.Conclusions: The study concludes that CAL is a promising teaching option when compared to traditional demonstration lectures for undergraduate practical pharmacology classes

Secure quantum conversation through non-destructive discrimination of highly entangled multipartite states

"Quantum conversation" is a way in which two parties can communicate classical information with each other using entanglement as a shared resource. We present this scheme using a multipartite entangled state after describing its generation through appropriate circuit diagrams. We make use of a discrimination scheme which allows one to perform a measurement on the system without destroying its entanglement. We later prove that this scheme is secure in a noiseless and a lossless quantum channel.Comment: 6 page

Dengue in India

Dengue virus belongs to family Flaviviridae, having four serotypes that spread by the bite of infected Aedes mosquitoes. It causes a wide spectrum of illness from mild asymptomatic illness to severe fatal dengue haemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome (DHF/DSS). Approximately 2.5 billion people live in dengue-risk regions with about 100 million new cases each year worldwide. The cumulative dengue diseases burden has attained an unprecedented proportion in recent times with sharp increase in the size of human population at risk. Dengue disease presents highly complex pathophysiological, economic and ecologic problems. In India, the first epidemic of clinical dengue-like illness was recorded in Madras (now Chennai) in 1780 and the first virologically proved epidemic of dengue fever (DF) occurred in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Eastern Coast of India in 1963-1964. During the last 50 years a large number of physicians have treated and described dengue disease in India, but the scientific studies addressing various problems of dengue disease have been carried out at limited number of centres. Achievements of Indian scientists are considerable; however, a lot remain to be achieved for creating an impact. This paper briefly reviews the extent of work done by various groups of scientists in this country

Prevalent Dental Myths and Practices in Indian Population- A Systematic Review

Objectives: The present systematic review was conducted to assess knowledge and awareness on prevalent dental myths related to infant teething, pregnancy and cleft lip and palate and various oral health habits in Indian population. Method: Electronic and manual database was searched vigorously between period of January 1994 to January 2017 using PUBMED and GOOGLE SCHOLAR search engines to include relevant studies from peer-reviewed journals which have been conducted in India.Results: A total of 24 scientific questionnaire studies conducted in various states of India were included. 16 out of 24 studies (66.67%) dealt with various dental myths and practices prevalent among rural Indian population whereas only 1 study included both urban and rural populations. Region wise maximum studies were conducted in Southern region [8 studies (33.3%)] followed by 7 studies (29.16%) in Northern, 6 studies (25%) in Western and 1-1 study (4.16% each) in Eastern and Central India respectively. Conclusion: The results indicate that the knowledge and awareness levels about dental myths and oral practices in both rural and urban population in various regions of India is inadequate. It is necessary for dental practitioners to educate masses for better dental health

A Positive Deviance Inquiry on Effective Communicative Practices of Rural Indian Women Entrepreneurs

Why do some rural women entrepreneurs in India succeed despite low levels of literacy, staggering household responsibility, unsupportive social structures, and oppressive cultural practices? The present article employed the Positive Deviance (PD) approach to identify the effective communication practices of rural women entrepreneurs in Uttar Pradesh, India, who succeed against overwhelming odds. Starting with an initial pool of 21,024 rural Indian women who received microloans for income-generation, and through several sieving rounds of focus group conversations with over 1,100 women, 24 PD women entrepreneurs were identified. A variety of participatory processes and liberating structures—Discovery and Action Dialogues (DADs), improvisational theater and prototyping, personal storytelling, and card-sorting games—were employed to identify the highly uncommon practices of PD entrepreneurs. These uncommon practices included micro interpersonal behaviours to connect deeply with customers, personalised branding of their businesses, daily diary jottings to monitor sales and profits, reframing value propositions to persuade customers, and others.publishedVersio

2N2N qubit "mirror states" for optimal quantum communication

We introduce a new genuinely 2N qubit state, known as the "mirror state" with interesting entanglement properties. The well known Bell and the cluster states form a special case of these "mirror states", for N=1 and N=2 respectively. It can be experimentally realized using $SWAP$ and multiply controlled phase shift operations. After establishing the general conditions for a state to be useful for various communicational protocols involving quantum and classical information, it is shown that the present state can optimally implement algorithms for the quantum teleportation of an arbitrary N qubit state and achieve quantum information splitting in all possible ways. With regard to superdense coding, one can send 2N classical bits by sending only N qubits and consuming N ebits of entanglement. Explicit comparison of the mirror state with the rearranged N Bell pairs and the linear cluster states is considered for these quantum protocols. We also show that mirror states are more robust than the rearranged Bell pairs with respect to a certain class of collisional decoherence.Comment: To be published in EPJ