Governments and education systems worldwide have tried using additional cash transfers to encourage school enrolment and attendance, and to reduce the attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their peers. There are now many strands of evidence on the success of such schemes. This paper presents the results of international structured…

Objective: Low socioeconomic status young people in low- and middle-income countries use tobacco at higher rates than their wealthier peers. School-based tobacco use prevention interventions that employ a life skills approach are effective at preventing tobacco use. In India, the Salaam Bombay Foundation (SBF) has implemented a multiyear,…

Education is fundamental to learning and is a pre-requisite for development. It is also imperative for sustained growth and development of a nation. There is still a long way to go for India in achieving Goal 4 and 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals quality education and gender equality by 2030. Despite several government initiatives and…

Innovation is the central driver of economic growth. Many growth models underscore the importance of actively directing more individuals to innovation (Romer, 1990; Jones, 2022). This goal can be achieved by providing early exposure to innovation to children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Bell et al., 2019; Akcigit et al., 2020;…

With a flourishing social enterprise ecosystem and an appetite among NGOs and policymakers for testing new solutions, India is playing a leading role in its use of innovative financing for development. One such innovative tool is an impact bond, which is a type of outcome-based financing structure where upfront capital is given to service…

To test the efficacy of an intervention to reduce tobacco use among youth (10-19 years old) in slum communities in Delhi, India. This community-based cluster-randomized trial included 14 slums composed of purposely built resettlement colonies and adjacent inhabitant-built Jhuggi Jhopris. Youth in the intervention received a 2 year…

Teaching argumentation with appropriate activities and strategies would support a wide range of goals in science education. Though science labs have been suggested and employed for argumentation activities, such educational expenditures are likely to be beyond the means of most schools in under-resourced areas. Due to the lack of appropriate…

The constructivist form of learning creates such an environment where the learners are not only active but they become actors' i.e members and contributors of the social and information space without taking into consideration the geographic boundaries. Such an innovative form of distance education was initiated in India in the year 2007 and it was…

Hole-in-the-Wall as a concept has attracted worldwide attention. It involves providing unconditional access to computer-equipped kiosks in playgrounds and out-of-school settings, children taking ownership of their learning and learning driven by the children's natural curiosity. It is posited that this approach, which is being used in India,…

Communication is an important input in development. The role of communication is socio-economic and cultural development at national and international levels. Development is considered an important component of progress. The progressive change is described as alterations in awareness, motivation and participation of the individuals. With the…

What and how much can children learn without subject teachers? In an attempt to find a limit to self organized learning, we explored the capacity of 10-14 year old Tamil-speaking children in a remote Indian village to learn basic molecular biology, initially on their own with a Hole-in-the-Wall public computer facility, and later with the help of…

Many countries mandate affirmative action in university admissions for traditionally disadvantaged groups. Little is known about either the efficacy or costs of these programs. This paper examines affirmative action in engineering colleges in India for "lower-caste" groups. We find that it successfully targets the financially…

This paper describes and analyses the experience of designing, installing and evaluating a farmer-usable touch screen information kiosk on cattle health in a veterinary institution in Pondicherry. The contents of the kiosk were prepared based on identified demands for information on cattle health, arrived at through various stakeholders meetings.…