Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) are historically disadvantaged communities that face discrimination on the grounds of their lower social positioning in society. This dissertation comprises 5 Chapters. Chapter 1 provides a brief outline regarding the stratification in India based on Caste and illustrates the importance of studying…

The Reaching the Unreached--Scale-Up (RtU-S) project was launched in 2018 and completed in 2021. It was an extension of the Reaching the Unreached project (RtU) and sought to expand the success of the initial project in providing hard-to-reach women and girls with education and economic opportunities. RtU-S continued its activities in Bangladesh,…

Food insecurity is a global concern and is acute in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as well as pockets in the global North. In the lush green spaces of "God's Own Country", the state of Kerala in India, about 379,000 women are engaged in farming in about 75,800 groups. Spearheaded by Kudumbashree, the State Poverty Eradication Mission…

In this article we describe evolving educational aspirations and practices of female high school students and their families in the context of rapidly changing education and employment markets in Kolkata. We interviewed 35 families of girls attending two government high schools. The families are from lower middle-class and lower income…

This report introduces a two-week workshop on web coding and environmental sustainability at a school for girls in Northeastern India. Our discussion of this teaching project reviews issues that shaped the project's development, outlines resources required for implementation, and summarizes the workshop's curriculum. High-speed Internet will soon…

This report documents the baseline-endline study by the GIRLS Inspire team's Reaching the Unreached project to examine the implications of skills training and education for women's and girls' empowerment and sustainable livelihoods in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. It is based on data collected from quarterly reports mirrored against the project…

This report presents regional qualitative findings from three countries in Asia--India, Indonesia, and the Philippines--where the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP) was implemented from 2001-2013 The report is second in a series of research reports from the IFP Alumni Tracking Study, a 10-year study that explores the personal…

The increased participation of women in higher education in India since 1947 has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Since independence, there have been shifts--dispersal and clustering of women students in various disciplines in higher education. There is a need to understand the processes of decision making regarding schooling,…

Transitions to adulthood are usually defined by markers such as leaving school, starting a first job, leaving the parental home, forming a first union, marrying and having a first child. Youth policy remains strongly influenced by these linear transitions, and by the metaphor of a "pathway" from school to work and adulthood, taking…

Background: Audio computer-assisted self-interviews (ACASI) are increasingly used in health research to improve the accuracy of data on sensitive behaviors. However, evidence is limited on its use among low-income populations in countries like India and for measurement of sensitive issues such as domestic violence. Method: We compared reports of…

Compared husband's role in single- and dual-earner families on perceptions of the ideal role of husband by both spouses, decision-making roles, and division of domestic labor. Except in decision-making, the wife's employment made little difference to either perception or performance of the husband's role. (Author/KS).

This paper presents disadvantaged households' "mental models" about low-fee private (LFP) schooling for their daughters in a study in Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh. It argues that assumptions in the dominant discourse on girls' schooling in India obscure the complex negotiations and trade-offs disadvantaged families make when…

This study analyses the impact of democratic decentralisation on the chances of socially excluded groups to participate in newly created local governance institutions--Panchayati Raj Institutions--in three Indian states. This institutional reform included a quota for the disadvantaged--women and lower castes--to ensure their effective…