Research

Rajasthan Priorities explores the merits and pitfalls of different solutions for Rajasthan, covering themes related to poverty, health, education, the environment, and many others.

Follow the links to learn more about the benefits and costs of specific policy interventions by topic or scroll down for a complete archive of the research papers.

Adolescent Issues

Agriculture and Food Security

Crime and Violence

Digitisation

Economy, Business and Industry

Education

Energy

Environment and Climate Change

Gender

Health Systems, Maternal and Child Health

Health: Infectious Diseases

Health: Non-Communicable Diseases

Nutrition

Poverty

Skill Development and Employment

Urbanisation, Migration and Transport

Water and Sanitation

Rajasthan Priorities: Energy Distribution, ILFS

This research paper aims to evaluate options to enhance energy efficiency in Rajasthan – specifically in power distribution and agriculture irrigation pumping. The two interventions analysed are High Voltage Distribution System (HVDS): Conversion of low tension lines feeding agriculture consumers to HVDS and HVDS and Energy Efficient Pumpsets (EEPS): Intervention 1 plus replacement of inefficient pump sets with efficient ones

Rajasthan Priorities: Poverty, Sulaiman

This paper analyses the evidence on the necessity of subsidies for increasing uptake of crop insurance, and its potential impacts on farmers’ risk-taking ability and health benefit and second a graduation model that provides a potential avenue of expanding social protection for ultra-poor.

Rajasthan Priorities: Outdoor Air Pollution, Bhattacharjya

The economic and social benefit-cost assessment undertaken in this study looks at two options of cleaner kiln technologies in the state of Rajasthan. The two options involve improvement of existing Clamp Kilns and (and FCBTK technology) to the Zig-Zag Kilns, and Vertical Shaft Brick Kilns (VSBK) technology.

Rajasthan Priorities: Energy Last Mile, ILFS

The vast majority of the population without access to electricity in India resides in rural areas. The electrification rate in urban areas is 97%, while rural electrification rate was 74% as of 2016 (IEA, 2017). Several dedicated programmes funded by the Government of India have been initiated in the past to address the challenge of rural electrification.

Rajasthan Priorities: Urban Infrastructure, ILFS

This paper conducts a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of three urban interventions aimed at providing: 24x7 piped water supply, 100 percent coverage for sewage and wastewater treatment, and 100 percent management of solid waste (collection, transportation and treatment).

Rajasthan Priorities: Crime & Violence, Raghavendran

This paper examines two successful interventions to address IPV in South Africa and Uganda and assesses potential benefit to cost if these interventions were implemented in Rajasthan.

Rajasthan Priorities: Agriculture, Mittal

The Union Government is aiming to double farmer incomes by 2022, in this context it is necessary to review existing agricultural policies, and in particular to evaluate strategies related to productivity enhancement which may provide pathways to improving incomes.

Rajasthan Priorities: Digitisation, Digital Empowerment Foundation

This study examines the costs and benefits of 2 interventions. First, connecting rural households to NOFN and second, linking the last group of unconnected MGNREGA workers to the Aadhaar scheme.

Rajasthan Priorities: Water Resource Managment, Kumar

Expansion of irrigation in the desert region of western Rajasthan through lifting canal water into diggies (small pond to store the canal water supply that addresses the reliability issue) and using it for irrigation through sprinkler system and selection of crops that are less water-intensive enables farmers to take up crop production even in undulating land, having saline groundwater, thereby reducing irrigation water application requirements.

Rajasthan Priorities: Education, Sunay Policy Advisory

The first three interventions in this study are teaching at the right level, computer assisted learning at the right level and performance-based incentives to teachers that are very cost-effective, evidence backed approaches to addressing declining student-learning outcomes in the state of Rajasthan. The other two interventions are those that are given greater prominence after the enactment of the Right to Education Act. These interventions are expanding the in-service training of teachers and reducing the pupil-teacher ratios.

Rajasthan Priorities: Indoor Air Pollution, Larsen

Three interventions are evaluated in this paper in terms of their benefits and costs - promotion of improved biomass cookstoves; free provision of LPG connection to poor households and a 50% reduction of subsidies to LPG fuel.

Rajasthan Priorities: Energy Storage, Bandyopadhyay

The study analyses the benefits and costs from TES applications in commercial buildings for two technological applications (with ice and hybrid salt as phase change material) in an ex-ante situation when the technology has not yet been applied in commercial buildings of Rajasthan.

Rajasthan Priorities: Adolescents, IIHMR

This study has looked into three critical problems that affect adolescents in the context of Rajasthan. These problems are: prevalence of girl child marriage, prevalence of anaemia among adolescent girls, and mental health problems among the adolescent population in schools.

Rajasthan Priorities: Health Systems, IIHMR

This study analyses three interventions namely Strengthening Basic and Surgical Capacities to reduce Maternal and Neonatal deaths, improving emergency referral management using 108 ambulance services and family planning.

Rajasthan Priorities: Non-Communicable Diseases, Seshadri

India is currently undergoing an epidemiological transition, with rising morbidity and mortality due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The WHO (2014), based on Global Status Report on NCDs data, reported that NCDs account for more than 5.87 million or about 60% of all deaths in India.

Rajasthan Priorities: Child Marriage, Mithal

Child marriage is defined by India’s Child Marriage Prohibition Act 2006 as the marriage of girls under 18 years of age, and marriage of boys below 21 years of age. Although efforts to reduce child marriage in India have sharply accelerated over the past two decades, raising the median age of marriage of both girls and boys to over 18, the country still accounts for close to 40% of the world’s child marriages with one-in-five girls married before the age of 15.

Rajasthan Priorities: Nutrition, Subramanian

India is the home of largest number of undernourished children in the world (World Bank 2005). In 2005–2006, nearly half of all children under 5 years of age in India were stunted and 43 per cent were underweight (International Institute for Population Sciences 2007).

Rajasthan Priorities: Skills, Sunay Policy Advisory

India presently has only 2.3 percent of its workforce with some kind of formal skills training. According to Government's Skill Gap Analysis Report, approximately 119 million skilled workers will be needed in the 24 key sectors of the economy by 2022. For the next two decades, over 12 million youth are expected to enter India's labor force.

Rajasthan Priorities: Social Housing, Kundu

Providing ownership housing to all houseless households and those living in unacceptable dwelling units on account of the temporary or obsolete structure, congestion, privacy factors, slum and squatter settlements, etc. has been in the policy domain for past few decades.

Rajasthan Priorities: Trade, Palit

This paper examines the feasibility of three policy interventions for implementation in state of Rajasthan for enhancing the competitiveness of its exports. Rajasthan being a part of the transport connectivity landscape of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), the interventions include development of an inland container depot and container terminal; a free trade warehousing zone (FTWZ); and scientific facilities for testing and certifying organic food exports.

Rajasthan Priorities: Tuberculosis, Arinaminpathy

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major global health challenge, and in 2016 India accounted for over a quarter of estimated TB incidence and over a fifth of estimated TB mortality worldwide, the highest burden of any country (WHO, 2017). Prime Minister Modi recently set the goal of ending tuberculosis by 2025, five years earlier than the world committed in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Rajasthan Priorities: Ease of Doing Business, Pahle India Foundation

The unemployment rate of 14.3 percent as in March 2018 is the highest ever that Rajasthan has witnessed over the last two years and thus, emphasizes the need to boost private sector investment in the state. Businesses in Rajasthan continue to witness various administrative and regulatory issues on a regular basis.

Rajasthan Priorities: Farmer Distress, Banik

Agriculture and allied sector in India accounts for 14% of GDP and is a source of livelihood for 58% of the population with reference to fiscal year 2016-17 (Central Statistics Office, Government of India, 2016). This paper seeks to research on the reasons for farmer distress in the state of Rajasthan, and research on the interventions for alleviating the distress.

Rajasthan Priorities: Water & Sanitation, Larsen

Diarrheal disease caused nearly 1.7 million deaths globally in 2016. Nearly 0.8 million of these deaths occurred in India of which 90% were due to unsafe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene according to estimates by the Global Burden of Disease 2016 (GBD 2016). In Rajasthan over 47 thousand deaths were caused by diarrheal disease and intestinal infections (mainly typhoid and paratyphoid) in 2016, constituting 8.7% of all deaths in the state according to GBD 2016, thus remaining a major cause of concern in relation to drinking water and sanitation.

Rajasthan Priorities: Maternal & Child Health, Shariff

India figures amongst the highest prevalence of neonatal mortality in the world, with about 0.75 million neonates dying every year. More than 659,000 newborn babies die every year in India – amongst the highest number of newborn deaths in the world. India also accounts for twenty percent of all maternal deaths worldwide, with more than 150 women dying in India each day due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.

Rajasthan Priorities: Early Childhood Development, Shariff

This study aims to address the issue of quality of education and enrolment ratios in preschool education offered by Anganwadi Centers (AWCs) in Rajasthan. Cost-benefit analysis of two interventions: i) a conditional cash incentive to induce uptake of PSE services for 4 year olds at AWCs and, ii) improving quality of pre-school education at AWCs by hiring external teaching inputs from localized organizations specializing in early childhood development.

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