11 September, 2025Night shift bans and female employment in Indian manufacturing
Between 2014 and 2017, seven Indian states amended their regulations to allow women to work night shifts in factories, with the condition that employers provide female-friendly amenities. This article...
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Bhanu Gupta Kanika Mahajan Anisha Sharma Daksh Walia 
08 September, 2025
- Articles
Exit barriers as entry barriers: Explaining India’s odd development path
Despite an abundance of low-skilled labour, India never experienced the kind of take-off in labour-intensive manufacturing seen in other countries at similar income levels. This article argues that a ...
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Shoumitro Chatterjee Kala Krishna Kalyani Padmakumar Yingyan Zhao
- 29 August, 2025
- Articles
Planning for ‘jobs of the future’ in a changing world
Following decades of structural transformation, in the coming years, external factors including climate change, increasing automation, and global economic policies will all play a role in determining ...
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Nikita Mujumdar
- 01 May, 2025
- Perspectives
Old or new: What’s driving employment growth in formal manufacturing?
As the government undertakes various initiatives for manufacturing, it is important to understand what type of firms drive employment growth in the sector. Based on data on registered firms from the A...
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Radhicka Kapoor P.P. Krishnapriya
- 28 February, 2025
- Articles
Technological advancement and employment changes: Recent trends in India
What is the impact of rapid technological advancements on employment in the Indian economy? In this post, Kathuria and Dev analyse ‘Consumer Pyramids Household Survey’ data to explore this questio...
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Aakash Dev Rajat Kathuria
- 24 January, 2025
- Perspectives
Feminisation of India’s industrial workforce
In recent years, the average annual growth rate in manufacturing employment has exceeded that of aggregate employment in India. In this post, Goldar and Aggarwal demonstrate that this trend is accompa...
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Suresh Chand Aggarwal Bishwanath Goldar
- 22 January, 2025
- Perspectives
Is digitalisation a double-edged sword for workers in India's public healthcare system?
While technology is often celebrated as a solution to healthcare inefficiencies, its impact on India’s Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) tells a more complex story. Drawing on qualitative r...
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Sreerupa .
- 13 January, 2025
- Notes from the Field
Post-Covid informal manufacturing growth: How states fared
Recently released official data show an expansion in informal manufacturing in India in the post-pandemic period. In this post, Goldar and Aggarwal conduct a cross-state analysis and highlight that Bi...
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Suresh Chand Aggarwal Bishwanath Goldar
- 04 November, 2024
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Share of manufacturing in India’s total employment: No mean performance
Available jobs data show only a modest increase in the share of manufacturing in India’s total employment in the last 50 years. In this post, Bishwanath Goldar highlights that the outsourcing of ser...
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Bishwanath Goldar
- 06 September, 2024
- Perspectives
Patent protection in India: Impact on innovation, pricing and competition
When stronger patent laws were introduced in India, there were fears that it would lead to higher prices without substantial gains in innovation. This article provides evidence that stronger patent pr...
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Apoorva Gupta Joel Stiebale
- 12 August, 2024
- Articles
How can India become a manufacturing powerhouse?
India’s manufacturing sector has been stagnant over the past 20 years, in terms of contribution to national output as well as employment generation. In this article, Ejaz Ghani locates the explanati...
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Ejaz Ghani
- 22 July, 2024
- Perspectives
Subcontracting linkages in India’s informal economy
Subcontracting relationships with larger firms are considered key to facilitating the growth of informal enterprises. Using four rounds of National Sample Survey data on Indian informal manufacturing ...
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Surbhi Kesar
- 27 June, 2024
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Bringing work home: Flexible work arrangements as ‘gateway jobs’ for women
Millions of women stay out of the workforce despite having a desire for paid work, often because available opportunities are incompatible with traditional norms of household roles. Based on an experim...
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Lisa Ho Suhani Jalota Anahita Karandikar
- 24 May, 2024
- Articles
Can shared social identity minimise corporate frictions?
A separation between owners and managers of firms gives rise to various problems known as ‘agency conflicts’. This article explores whether having a shared social identity between managers and boa...
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Jitendra Aswani
- 13 May, 2024
- Articles
Creating good jobs for young Indians: Insights from recent research
Young Indians – who are often more educated and have greater aspiration than their previous generations –are seeking ‘good jobs’. Yet, such jobs are not available to the majority. To mark Inte...
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Nikita Mujumdar
- 03 May, 2024
- Perspectives
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Productivity & Innovation Posts
The impact of robotisation on the world economy: A forward-looking review
Robots have long existed in human imagination and only recently in the real world. The baggage of past imagination often intrudes into our understanding of how real robots will affect our economic liv...
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- 25 July, 2018
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Tripura’s bamboo sector: Potential and challenges
About a third of the total area of Tripura is covered by bamboo, and bamboo has emerged as a key thrust area for the state’s industrial development. Based on a field visit that was undertaken to stu...
- Bornali Bhandari
- 13 April, 2018
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An offline alternative for Aadhaar-based biometric authentication
While decision on the constitutionality of Aadhaar by the Supreme Court of India remains a matter of speculation, it has become abundantly clear that most of the use cases for Aadhaar-based biometric ...
- Subhashis Banerjee Subodh V. Sharma
- 24 September, 2018
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