Risk management in agriculture

This monograph was written to be part of the series of studies commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture under the rubric of "State of Indian Farmer - A Millennium Study". On the basis of existing literature, this study documents the status of our knowledge on risks of agriculture and their management. Chapter 2 discusses the evidence on the nature, type and magnitude of agricultural risks. Chapter 3 discusses farmer strategies to combat risk. In addition to the mechanisms at the level of the farm household, the need to cope with risk can also affect community interactions and social customs. This is examined in Chapter 4. In chapter 5, we consider how production risks have been transformed by developments in the agricultural economy in the post-independence period. In chapter 6, we review the principal developments that have impacted on market risks.

Exercising in India: An Exploratory Analysis Using The Time Use Survey, 2019

In this paper, we use the nationally representative Time Use Survey (TUS) data from India to estimate the proportion of people that spend any time of the day exercising. We found that overall, less than 7% of the adult population (age ≥18 Years) spent any time of the day exercising. Our estimates also revealed that the proportion of population exercising varied Across states, by rural and urban sectors, and by social and religious groups. We also estimated logistic regressions to Model the probability of people exercising. We found that males had three times higher odds of exercising than females. Relative to less educated people (primary school and below), those with educational level of graduate and above had almost 2.5 times higher odds of exercising. People in the higher strata of consumption class, the top 10%, had 1.7 times higher odds of exercising relative to the bottom 50%. From a public policy perspective, the low level of exercise across all geographies and social, economic, and demographic characteristics indicates the need for population-wide interventions in India to encourage exercise

Crop Fires and Cardiovascular Health : A Study from North India

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Do Spouses Make Claims? Empowerment and Microfinance in India

Summary We study a microfinance program that provides compulsory health insurance to its borrowers and their spouses. We find that non-borrowing spouses are less likely to file insurance claims than those who are borrowing. Further, a man is more likely to use the health insurance acquired through his wife's loan than is a woman (through her husband's loan). These patterns suggest that women who do not borrow are disempowered relative to those who do.health insurance microfinance claims gender empowerment India

Substitution Bias and External Validity: Why an Innovative Anti-poverty Program Showed no Net Impact

The net impact of development interventions can depend on the availability of close substitutes to the intervention. We analyze a randomized trial of an innovative anti-poverty program in South India which provides “ultra-poor” households with inputs to create a new, sustainable livelihood. We find no statistically significant evidence of lasting net impact on consumption, income or asset accumulation. Instead, income from the new livelihood substituted for earnings from wage labor. A very similar intervention made a large difference elsewhere in South Asia, however, where wage labor alternatives were less compelling. The analysis highlights the roles of substitution bias and dropout bias in shaping evaluation results and delimiting external validity.57 p