Indian cities are engines of upward mobility
Satellites, firms, and digital government services are generating endless data in developing countries. But decision-makers can't use it — it's either locked away or just too difficult to learn from. We build huge open data platforms for policy-makers, researchers, and the public.
We target policy domains where new data can guide important decisions. Check out our work mobilizing data on 10 million criminal cases and our real-time Covid tracking data.
India's cities are engines of poverty reduction, but could they do more? We are building a research center to identify pathways of urban improvement and to make cities thrive.
We built the first comprehensive dataset on India's neighborhoods. Neighborhoods matter. We found that cross-neighborhood access disparities swamp the cross-district differences that policy makers pay the most attention to. Read more about how residential segregation shapes economic opportunity in India.
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Low intergenerational mobility has been a central feature of the caste system for generations. The last 40 years of economic progress have tremendously improved the living standards of the people at the bottom, but they have barely changed poor people's likelihood of rising up the economic ladder in relative terms.
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Cities are engines of opportunity, but also bring crime, air pollution, and other risks. Who faces the burden of these downsides of density and how is it affected by urban policy? India's census machinery is designed for a rural economy, and sheds little light on how people are doing in cities. We are building a new urban data platform to better answer these and other related questions.
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Since the 19th century, ethnographers have been writing long-form monographs cataloging the cultural norms of India's 5000 subcaste groups. We are using large language models to classify these ethnographies and building a 150-year panel of cultural change. Patriarchy, purity, inheritance, occupations, and a lot more.
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Canals transform local agriculture and stay in place for 100 years. This gives us a chance to study how agricultural change transforms human behavior over the long run. We found that human migration is by far the first order result in the long-run. Canals have totally reshaped the human landscape.
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We worked with a team of epidemiologists to calculate excess mortality from India's two major Covid waves, and found that mortality was over six times higher than official reports.
Read our paper in Science
We assembled and open-sourced data on 80 million court cases in India to study judicial decision-making. We wrote a paper on judicial bias — encouragingly, we did not find much. The open data has catalyzed a wide range of other projects.
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Read our seminal paper on PMGSY, India's large-scale rural road construction program. We found that remote rural villages were still opportunity-poor even after being connected to market. But the roads helped residents find better jobs outside of their villages.
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Can you grow up poor and still win the Nobel Prize? And has our society gotten better at giving opportunities to brilliant people from humble backgrounds?
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