The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005Desai, Sonalde, Amaresh Dubey, B.L. Joshi, Mitali Sen, Abusaleh Shariff and Reeve Vanneman. 2010. India Human Development in India: Challenges for a Society in Transition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pp. 234 is a nationally representative, multi-topic survey of 41,554 households in 1,503 villages and 971 urban neighborhoods across

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. Two one-hour interviews in each household covered topics concerning health, education, employment, economic status, marriage,

fertility Fertility in colloquial terms refers the ability to have offspring. In demographic contexts, fertility refers to the actual production of offspring, rather than the physical capability to reproduce, which is termed fecundity. The fertility rate ...

, gender relations, and

social capital Social capital is a concept used in sociology and economics to define networks of relationships which are productive towards advancing the goals of individuals and groups. It involves the effective functioning of social groups through interper ...

. Children aged 8-11 completed short reading, writing, and arithmetic tests. Additional village, school, and medical facility interviews are also available. A follow-up survey was conducted in 2012 that revisited over 40,000 of the same households as the 2005 survey. This makes the IHDS unique in India as a large-scale survey where results from two time periods can be directly compared. This survey was designed by Professors Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman from

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

and researchers from the

National Council of Applied Economic Research National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) is India’s oldest and largest independent, non-profit, economic policy research think tank. Established in New Delhi in 1956, it acquired considerable national and international standing w ...

and funded by the

National Institute of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Servic ...

. Results from this survey are summarized in a book titled ''Human Development in India: Challenges for a Society in Transition'', published in 2010 by the

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

References

{{Reflist
Full text available online.
Desai, Sonalde and Amaresh Dubey. 2011. "Caste in 21st Century India: Competing Narratives.” Economic and Political Weekly, 46(11): 40-49. Desai, Sonalde. 2010. “The Other Half of the Demographic Dividend.” Economic and Political Weekly, 45(40): 12-14. Desai, Sonalde and Lijuan Wu. 2010. “Structured Inequalities: Spatial Disparities in maternity Care in India,” Margin: A Journal of Applied Economics, 4(3): 293-320. Desai, Sonalde and Lester Andrist. 2010. “Gender Scripts and Age at Marriage in India,” Demography. 47(3):667-687. Abstract Desai, Sonalde. 2010. “Caste and Census: A Forward Looking Strategy.” Economic and Political Weekly, 45(9):10-13. Desai, Sonalde, Cecily Adams and Amaresh Dubey. 2009. “Segmented Schooling: Inequalities in Primary Education. In Sukhdeo Thorat and Katherine Newman (Eds.) Blocked by Caste: Discrimination and Social Exclusion in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Desai, Sonalde, Amaresh Dubey, Reeve Vanneman and Rukmini Banerji. 2009. “Private Schooling in India: A New Landscape,” India Policy Forum Vol. 5. Pp. 1-58, Bery, Suman, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya (Editors). New Delhi: Sage. Desai, Sonalde and Manjistha Banerji. 2008. “Negotiated Identities: Male Migration and Left Behind Wives in India.” Journal of Population Research, 25(3):337-355. Vanneman, Reeve and Amaresh Dubey. 2013. “Horizontal and Vertical Inequalities in India.” In Janet Gornick and Markus Jantti (eds.), Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Vikram, Kriti, Reeve Vanneman, and Sonalde Desai. 2012. “Linkages between Maternal Education and Childhood Immunization in India.” Social Science & Medicine 75(July): 331-339.

External links

India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005Stories from the Field
Demographics of India