Researchers from the University of Maryland, the National Council of Applied Economic Research, and AMS Consulting, together with an interdisciplinary team of collaborators, propose to field the second round of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-II), a nationally representative survey of 41,554 households who were surveyed in 2004-2005 under NIH grants R01HD041455 and R01HD046166. This survey is designed to be a premiere public resource for researchers interested in studying different dimensions of human development in India. The proposed project has two specific aims: A. Resurvey the households initially surveyed in 2004-5 once again in 2011-12. Given the vast changes in India since 2005, IHDS-II will provide a multi-topic, multi-purpose source of data for international and Indian research on health, education, income, employment, gender and social inequality. Panel data will allow an exploration of lagged effects as well as better estimation of causal relationships. IHDS-II will permit the analysis of two major government programs initiated since 2005 - the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the National Rural (and now Urban) Health Mission. These programs introduce exogenous changes in the male/female wage gap and provide cash incentives for hospital deliveries. Panel analyses of these changes create new opportunities to investigate the determinants of gender gaps in employment, education, and health. B. Expand the range of data collected. Data collection will be expanded in two principal ways: 7 Some questions from IHDS-I will be revised and extended based on our field experience, analysis results, and user feedback. 7 New modules will be added to study the mechanisms through which spatial disparities in health and education emerge. Research conducted under the parent grant has highlighted the importance of spatial disparities in health, education, income, and employment as well as caste and gender differences in these outcomes. Analyses of IHDS-I have showed us that these large regional differences persist in spite of a wide range of controls for individual level factors. In this renewal, we seek to measure a broader range of mechanisms through which these spatial disparities emerge. New efforts focus on supplementing the household surveys with expanded geographic data and institutional surveys.
As Indian economy grows, health profile of the Indian society is changing along with the mechanisms for financing health care. The proposed study will collect data that will facilitate research on a variety of topics associated with public health and child development in India. Data from India Human Development Survey I and II will be premier public resource for all researchers.
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