Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

664 items available

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/9388

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Lessons in Investment Promotion: The Case of Invest India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-26) Phillips, Joe; Heilbron, Armando; Kher, Priyanka
Foreign direct investment (FDI) can contribute significantly towards India reaching its aspiration of 8 percent growth per annum. Prior to 2009, India did not have a national dedicated organization with a specific mandate to promote and facilitate FDI. Invest India was then established, but it was not until 2015 that it was empowered to ramp up its investment promotion efforts, with the resources and reach to be fully active in the FDI marketplace. Invest India’s journey can be described against 9 critical success factors (CSFs) that chart how the agency responded to its challenges, to now deliver sustained success evidenced by facilitating USD 31 billion of FDI and direct creation of nearly 303,900 jobs. In part, Invest India has contributed to India’s stellar FDI performance in 2020, when the country reached another record of USD 64 million, against a global drop of 35 percent (UNCTAD 2021). While some challenges remain, Invest India’s journey provides valuable learnings for other investment promotion agencies (IPAs), which in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, will need to be in a period of review and reform.
India - Can Results-Based Incentives Encourage Teachers to Attend School?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Vivek, Kumar; Bhattacharjee, Pradyumna; Mani, Subha; Avinav, Kumar
The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund supports and disseminates research on the impact of results-based financing on learning outcomes. The EVIDENCE series highlights REACH grants around the world to provide empirical evidence and operational lessons helpful in the design and implementation of successful performance-based programs. A REACH-supported study tested the impact of results-based incentives for meso-level officials (Resource Persons, or RPs) and teachers on teacher attendance at school. The incentives led to a 15 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a teacher being present, averaged across audit visits. The training increased the amount of time RPs spent mentoring teachers, but this increased mentoring did not lead to any changes in teaching practices.
Effects of a Multifaceted Education Program on Enrollment, Learning, and Gender Equity: Evidence from Rajasthan, India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Delavallade, Clara; Griffith, Alan; Thonrton, Rebecca
The Sustainable Development Goals set a triple educational objective: improve access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This note documents the effectiveness of a multifaceted educational program pursuing these three objectives simultaneously. Using an experiment in 229 schools in rural Rajasthan, India, this study measures the effects of the program on students’ school participation and academic performance over two years, as well as its heterogeneous impacts by gender and initial learning ability. The findings show that the program increased student enrollment and retention, with the largest effects observed among girls. There is no evidence that the program differentially attracted lower-ability students. There were large learning gains in both years, where the learning outcomes of boys and girls improved equally. These findings suggest that multifaceted interventions can overcome the tradeoffs that often arise when pursuing multiple objectives in educational interventions.
Care Work and Intra-Household Tensions during COVID-19: Evidence from an Online Survey of Gig Workers in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08-01) Abel, Martin; Tas, Emcet O.; Zahra, Najaf; D'Lima, Tanya; Kalashyan, Anna; Sethi, Jayati
This note examines gender disparities in care work and intra-household tensions among online gig workers in India. The data was collected as part of an online experiment in April 2020, shortly after lockdown measures were implemented to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The findings show that childcare and eldercare responsibilities have increased for everyone during the lockdown, but women have disproportionately felt the burden of increased care work. Further, there was an increase in domestic violence, pointing to added stress and intra-household tensions. Policy makers need to incorporate a gender lens in emergency responses in order to promote women’s safety and wellbeing during COVID-19 and beyond.
Transforming Rural Non-Farm Livelihoods: The NRLM Journey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Gupta, Arshia; Nair, Vinod
Rural India is primarily an agri-based economy. Over-dependence on agriculture has meant declining percapita rural income which has gradually initiated a shift towards the non-farm sector. This transition from agriculture to non-farm sectors is considered an important source of economic growth. DAY-NRLM, which has been instrumental in reaching out to sixty-eight million rural poor women, witnessed a similar shift towards non-agricultural sources of income. This trend encouraged DAY-NRLM to adopt dedicated entrepreneurship promotion measures. Even though, NRLM is more than a decade old, enterprise development programmes have been initiated only in the last five years. These initiatives are expected to gain pace and momentum through National rural economic transformation project (NRETP), which aims to identify existing enterprises with growth potential and provide dedicated services to help them scale-up.
Leveraging Farmer Producer Companies to Transition to Market-Based Production Systems in Jharkhand
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Sethy, Paresh; Bihari, Bipin
Small and marginal farmers in India struggle for access to good quality inputs in farming of crops (seeds, fertilizers, crop protection) and livestock (stock species, breed, density, feed consumption); credit; market acceptance (such as for a new product); connectivity (for bulk marketing); and storage facilities. Aggregation of farmers into Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) has shown to overcome many of these problems. JOHAR FPCs are unique compared to existing ones because of their huge membership base (7,000–8,000 per FPC), shareholder composition (only women), and product basket with produce that helps double incomes. This note includes experiences and learnings of the implementation of marketing initiatives for: (i) a new poultry product, and (ii) increasing the marketing of tomato produce through post-harvest management practices and technologies.
Integration of Health and Nutrition into Livelihood Programs under DAY-NRLM
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Chava, Lakshmi Durga; Buggineni, Padma; Rani, P. Usha
Over the past two decades India has seen significant improvements in household incomes, agricultural productivity and child survival, although malnutrition among children remains high, despite improvements over the last decade. While stunting and underweight prevalence has gone down, trends in corporal wasting show an overall increase in the last decade. The decrease in stunting has been from 48 percent to 38.4 percent, (1 percentage point per year). Similarly, underweight prevalence has reduced by 0.68 percentage points from National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-3 (2005-06) to NFHS-4 (2015-16).
Social Inclusion: Implementation, Outcomes and Key Learnings
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Singh, Varun; Rani, P. Usha
The Government of India (GoI) approved the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) in June 2011 to implement a renewed demand-driven strategy of rural poverty alleviation and sustainable livelihoods, based on universal social mobilization, building community -managed institutions of the poor, and universal financial inclusion. The central objective of the NRLM is to ‘establish efficient and effective institutional platforms of the rural poor that enable them to increase household (HH) incomes through livelihood enhancements and improved access to financial and public services.’
Leveraging Institutional Platforms to Promote Convergence
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Kumar, Shantanu; Pinto, Alreena Renita; Gupta, Arshia
The launch of NRLM to address rural poverty marks a paradigm shift in poverty alleviation because unlike other programs that preceded it, the NRLM focuses on training and capacity building, and enabling women to prepare and implement their livelihoods plans through own institutions and from banks. The importance of promoting convergence with other rural development programs, as well other ministries, is enshrined in the framework of NRLM.
SHG-Bank Linkage: A Success Story
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Kumar, Shantanu; Pinto, Alreena Renita; Arora, Amit; Roy, Sourav
Access to adequate and timely credit at affordable rates is critical for the rural poor to alleviate high cost debt and invest in livelihood opportunities. Despite the government of India’s (GOI’s) best efforts, financial inclusion of the rural poor has been beset with multiple challenges. The SHG-Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) was initiated as an action research by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in 1989 and was subsequently crystallized into a pilot project in 1992. The pilot project was conceived of as a partnership between SHGs, Banks and NGOs in which the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allowed banks to lend directly to SHGs and NABARD committed to providing re-finance and promotional support. The SHGs have successfully leveraged about forty one billion US dollars loans from banks since 2013-2014. Advocacy with the RBI, digital financial services (DFS) and Indian Banks Association (IBA) and interventions at the field level have resulted in exemplary growth in the SHG-Bank linkage credit portfolio. The key outcomes are summarized in this report.