More than just an academic space, the Azim Premji University campus in Bengaluru is fast becoming a thriving ecosystem of its own. Located in Sarjapura, the campus is more than classrooms and labs — it is a habitat shared with birds, reptiles, insects, small mammals, and a growing canopy of trees and plants. This report is a first step in documenting the biodiversity of our campus. From trees and shrubs to spiders and snakes, students of the BSc in Environmental Science and Sustainability, teachers, and other members have come together to observe and record the life that surrounds us. Thus, this is a collective effort that reflects both scientific curiosity and deep care for our environment. As the campus grows, we aim not only to track carbon sequestration and environmental change — but also to nurture a sense of stewardship and belonging in everyone who calls this campus home.

This paper examines recent trends in corporate concentration in India’s non-financial sector, with a focus on developments since 2015. Using firm-level data from the CMIE Prowess database we document changes in asset and income distribution across firms. We find that while the overall decline in the public sector’s share of assets and income contributed to a reduction in measured concentration in earlier years, this was accompanied by a steady increase in the share held by large private business groups. By 2023 – 24, the top five business groups — Reliance, Tata, Adani, Aditya Birla, and Bharti — accounted for approximately 24(%) of total assets and 16(%) of total income in the non-financial corporate sector.

Authors:

Zico Dasgupta and Arjun Jayadev

This paper assesses excess mortality in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the year 2021 when the country experienced a substantial surge in deaths. Drawing on newly released official data from the Civil Registration System (CRS) and the Sample Registration System (SRS), and supplemented with estimates based on the National Family Health Survey (NFHS‑5), we construct a range of mortality estimates using multiple baseline comparisons. Excess deaths are calculated in absolute terms, per 1,000 population, and using age-standardised death rates to facilitate cross-state and international comparisons. Particular attention is paid to persistent challenges in India’s mortality data landscape, including regional disparities in death registration completeness, limitations in cause-of-death certification, and inconsistencies between administrative and survey-based sources. The analysis includes alternative projections that adjust for estimated registration completeness, underscoring the sensitivity of mortality estimates to underlying data assumptions. By applying standard demographic techniques such as age standardisation, we attempt to mitigate the effects of India’s heterogeneous age structure and registration coverage. The findings suggest a substantial mortality impact from the pandemic, exceeding officially reported figures, and raise broader questions about the capacity of statistical systems to support real-time health surveillance. We identify correlates in terms of state capacity.These results have implications for public health preparedness, intergovernmental coordination, and the long-term strengthening of civil registration and vital statistics systems in India.

Authors:

B S Bhargav, Dipa Sinha and Arjun Jayadev

The cross-sectional nature of Indian employment surveys limits a true understanding of labour market dynamics. Using innovations in official national-level labour surveys that track urban individuals across four quarters, we study transitions from unemployment to employment — defined as the job-finding rate — to understand whether those seeking employment are able to find suitable work in urban India. Our analysis reveals significant weaknesses in the urban Indian economy over the period 2017 to 2023. On an average, only 17 per cent of unemployed individuals in any quarter find a job in the next quarter. Job-finding rates are the lowest for women, the young and the highly educated. Hazard-rate analyses reveals that the same cohorts take the longest time to find jobs, with a majority remaining unemployed even after four quarters of job search. We demonstrate the impact of the pandemic on urban labour markets in two ways. Not only are job-finding rates significantly lower in the post-lockdown period relative to pre-lockdown, there has also been a shift in the nature of jobs created, with casual work rising and regular wage and self-employment falling post-lockdown. Our analysis has important policy implications for understanding labour market dynamics and for the design of urban employment schemes.

Authors:

Rahul Menon & Paaritosh Nath

The book explores the nature of human creativity and its importance in education with reference to past and ongoing work on creativity theory. It aims to direct the attention of teachers to the need for creativity in education by dispelling the mystique surrounding it, and the feelings of inadequacy or apprehension it may evoke in educators, particularly in the Asia region.

The book offers an introduction to creativity in writing: the rationale for including it in language programmes, the benefits it can bestow and the results it can produce – as well as dealing with common objections to it. It divides creative writing into two major sections – poetry and stories, followed by a copious set of varied classroom activities. For each activity, a standard format is adopted to offer teachers maximum support in implementing the procedures, including supplementary comments on each activity. It is distinct for its accessibility and clarity, its abundance of practical and ready-touse classroom activities and its unique combination of theoretical underpinnings and practical implementation.

This book will be useful to students, pre-service teachers and researchers who are new to the teaching of English Language, both in the Asian context and in the wider world. It will also be an essential companion to practicing in-service teachers and Teacher Trainers to further sharpen their concepts and skills.

Studies based on the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) in India have shown that the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on household incomes was progressive in nature — richer households suffered more. But several media reports as well as purposive surveys carried out during the pandemic suggest that the poor suffered more than the rich. We use nationally representative panel data for urban India from the official Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) to show that households that were relatively richer prior to the start of the pandemic suffered relatively less during the lockdown compared to households that were poorer. That is, the shock was regressive in nature. We also confirm that, as per CPHS, richer households did indeed experience higher drops in income than poorer ones. But we show that this progressivity is much less than what prevailed prior to the pandemic. Thus the pandemic either disrupted ongoing progressive income changes or was outright regressive in its impacts.

Authors:

Amit Basole, Anand Shrivastava, Jay Kulkarni and Akshit Arora

While the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated attention to the public health challenges of our times, many of these concerns are certainly not new. There are multiple public health concerns including the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, health risks due to environmental degradation and climate change, and re-emergence of several communicable diseases. Responses to these challenges, including educational responses, have often been reductionist and hence found to be inadequate. There has been an increasing global recognition of the need for transformative education to address the complex health challenges of the 21^st century. In this article, we discuss one such effort in designing a public health education programme in India that echoes the sentiment of transformative learning that is contextual, competency-driven, trans disciplinary, reflective, and collaborative. We discuss how these aspects of learning were reflected and considered through a series of internal deliberations within the university and external consultations with different stakeholders. This process involved examining existing gaps in public health education, articulating the core competencies, developing the curriculum, and envisaging students’ contribution to public health practice in India.

Authors:

Arima Mishra, Adithya Pradyumna, Mukta Gundi, Edward Premdas Pinto and Prasanna Saligram

Poverty in India has been defined and measured in several different ways over the years. This report presents a unique way to measure rural poverty in Chhattisgarh using data from the Mission Antyodaya Survey of 2019. We construct a rural multidimensional deprivation index (RDI), composed of indicators in the areas of infrastructure, health and education. The index can be decomposed into its different sub-components to understand which of the indicators contribute the most to deprivation and can be analysed at different levels, starting from the block to the taluka, district and state level. From a policy and public action perspective, the RDI is extremely useful because it is composed of public provisioning of amenities at the village level. A high RDI reflects lack of access to public amenities and deprivation in villages. Because India has a decentralised structure where the Panchayats are responsible for taking governance at the grassroot levels.  Results from this report can be extremely useful to these institutions as they can identify which villages need provisioning of what amenities and act accordingly.

Editors: Sandhya Krishnan, Prasanna S, Sanket Gharat, Puja Guha, Amalendu Jyotishi, and Neeraj Hatekar.

This issue focuses on practices that build a school culture – practices that become so ingrained in the school’s ethos that they come naturally to everyone and do not change if those who helped develop these move out of the school. It includes several aspects of the school culture, such as creating an environment where all students feel safe, valued, and seen; where there is no fear of any subject, where there is a high level of collaboration among teachers and continuous engagement with parents.

The Constitution of India has been amended over a hundred times in the last seven decades. Yet, its basic principles remain supreme. For young students of India’s growth and progress, a deeper understanding of its Articles is essential. The maturing of our democracy and the deeper social consciousness pervading our people, owes much to the manner in which we have been guided by its timeless precepts. A reading of ​‘Reviewing the Republic’ will help any reader appreciate how our Constitution came into being and its powerful impact on the daily life of our citizens. 

This is a monthly newsletter published by Azim Premji University, as a part of Forests of Life, a climate awareness festival celebrating forests — a quest and yatra of young people from across different parts to engage with the youth of this country. In this edition, we celebrate International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, aiming to raise awareness and protect the rights of the world’s indigenous population. We intend to pay respect to all the Indigenous people who have made significant contribution towards the preservation and transmission of traditional knowledge.

We all know the pure pleasure of listening to stories as children and we have, in this issue, articles that demonstrate how storytelling can be used to great success in subjects as diverse as maths, physics, social studies and inclusion in schools everywhere – urban or rural. There are descriptions of how discussions emerging from a single story can be skillfully used to arrive at some really important understanding. All this adds up to creating a channel of exchange that cuts across age groups and backgrounds and finds common ground in the magical world of stories.

This paper revisits a part of the analysis by Banerjee et al. (2020), in which they examine the consequences of the nation-wide scale up of reforms to the funds management system (e‑FMS) in India’s national workfare programme, using a two-way fixed effects specification. They report a substantial 19 percent reduction in labour expenditures. We exploit the recent literature that highlights the limitations of the TWFE estimator in the presence of staggered roll out and effect a Goodman-Bacon decomposition of the TWFE coefficient, to pinpoint sources of identifying variation. We undertake a detailed examination of subsamples of six constituent and valid DiDs based on timing of treatment that are averaged into the TWFE coefficient to identify heterogeneity in treatment effects. This disaggregated subsample analysis does not support the conclusion of any reductions in MGNREGS labour expenditures, suggesting that the TWFE coefficient based on the full sample is indeed biased.

Authors:

• Deepti Goel
• J.V. Meenakshi
• Zaeen De Souza

This issue of the Learning Curve tries to answer some hard questions about the present environmental crisis : who can we turn to make the changes required? How can we attempt to restore some of the lost balance? How can we make sure that this planet does not become extinct by the next millennium? Schools across the country are doing their bit, beginning with primary school, to create a well-informed, environmentally-aware generation. 

Author:

• Zico Dasgupta

The efficacy of survey-based policy recommendations is primarily dictated by the quality of data collected in the first place. Is the survey truly representative of the population it claims to characterise? Are respondents voicing their true opinions or are they playing to the gallery? Did enumerator bias creep into the data? These are questions that most users of surveys have, but are typically brushed aside in the race to get the analyses out. While there are no foolproof measures to ensure that survey data are authentic, certain steps can be taken to improve their dependability. One such is the use of what is called ​‘para data’ (data about the process of data collection), to streamline enumerator practices, and thereby improve the reliability of the data being collected. This report details our experience of using para data to improve the quality of the India Working Survey (IWS).

Authors:

• Deepti Goel
• Rosa Abraham
• Rahul Lahoti

The articles in this issue are broadly based on the two aspects of play in learning – the innumerable lessons that are learnt from play – teamwork, strategy, inclusion, respect, sharing, handling fights, settling arguments, addressing bullying, and second, how play can be used as pedagogy for circular learning as well as structured activities such as educational videos and unstructured ones like pretend play. The idea behind both is to nurture the free spirit with which child must learn.

A field study was conducted in August, 2021, with 363 primary school teachers across 18 districts to capture teachers’ voices on what has happened during school closure since the pandemic began and what needs to be done once schools reopen.

Yellow foot Clam (Paphia malabarica) fishery of the Ashtamudi lake, one of the deepest lakes in Kerala supports the livelihoods of thousands of clam-collectors in the region. These clams are highly demanded in the international market and it enables the clam-collectors to generate their income through export began in late 80s. An increased export market demand exerted a lot of pressure on the resource which ultimately led to the depletion of clam resources. As a response to this unexpected decline in resource size and lost income, the clam collector community in Ashtamudi came forward to address the issue by forming a collective of clam-collectors at the village level. As a management strategy, they voluntarily abstained from fishing during the breeding season and demanded management of resource through a participatory mode of governance. After years of experience in the management of resource through voluntary measures, Ashtamudi clam resource entered a new regime of resource management. It got certified as ​“sustainable” resource by the world’s largest marine wild-catch certification program, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) which promotes the governance of marine fisheries resources through market incentives. This study is an attempt to understand these varied and unique governance regime experiences of clam resource from participatory to market-based systems and the implications of these governance regimes in the property rights, livelihoods and social development of clam-collectors of Ashtamudi.

पाठशाला भीतर और बाहर के इस 5वें अंक में शामिल है एक लेख कि बच्चों का सवाल पूछना कितना जरूरी है और उन सवालों को किस तरह से समझा जाए। शिक्षकों के क्षमता संवर्धन में उनके अनुभवों का लिखा जाना कितना जरूरी है, बच्चों को सवाल पूछने के अवसर देना और उनके सवालों को समझना जैसे विषयों पर महत्वपूर्ण आलेख भी इस अंक में शामिल हैं।

The recently released data from the 2017 – 2018 Periodic Labour Force Survey have created a controversy regarding the quantity of employment generated in the past few years in India. Estimates ranging from an absolute increase of 23 million to an absolute decline of 15.5 million have been published. In this paper we show that some of the variation in estimates can be explained by the way in which populations are projected based on Census 2011 data. We estimate the change in employment using the cohort-component method of population projection. We show that for men total employment rose but the increase fell far short of the increase in working age population. For women, employment fell. The decline is concentrated among women engaged in part-time or occasional work in agriculture and construction. 

Authors:

• Paaritosh Nath
• Amit Basole

Does there exist a trade-off between labour’s income share and output growth rate? Or does a reduction in wage share in itself reduce the output growth rate? These questions have returned to the centre stage in the midst of India’s present crisis as the government sought the dilution and suspension of labour laws as a counter-cyclical policy instrument. In the absence of any other stimulus or countervailing factors, the impact of such a policy would hinge on the relationship between income distribution and effective demand. This paper attempts to lay bare this relationship for the Indian economy through an empirical analysis of India’s macro data and a theoretical model on the basis of regression results.

Author:

• Zico Dasgupta

This issue proves that children can, and do, learn, provided they get the encouragement, support, respect and dignity that is due to them during the process and after. The response got for the topic was so overwhelming that it led to the creation of a second part.. It is all about children learning. and enjoying themselves in the process, rather than just getting a formal education.

पाठशाला भीतर और बाहर का तीसरा अंक स्कूली शिक्षा के दो महत्त्वपूर्ण सरोकारों पर चर्चा व विश्लेषण करता हैं- रटन्त पढ़ाई का मसला और सही मायने में सीखने का सवाल। शारीरिक दण्ड के ऐतिहासिक और दार्शनिक आयामों पर भी इसमें एक लेख शामिल है। इस अंक में कुछ अनुभव आधारित लेख भी हैं जिनमें एक ग्रामीण परिस्थितियों में शिक्षक की निर्मिति पर, एक स्कूल हेडमास्टर की यादों पर और एक इस बात से सम्बन्धित है कि हम बच्चों को कितना समझते हैं। भारत में शिक्षा के विकास पर लेख की ऋंखला इस अंक में भी जारी है क्योंकि इसमें यात्रा के एक महत्त्वपूर्ण कालखंड के अध्ययन को प्रस्तुत किया गया है। हर अंक की तरह इस अंक में भी शिक्षकों से साक्षात्कार और पुस्तक चर्चा जैसे स्थाई स्तम्भ शामिल हैं। 

The third issue has articles that discuss and analyse two important concerns of school education – the question of rote memorization and actual learning. There is also an article on the historical and philosophical dimensions of corporal punishment. There are interesting experience-based articles – one on the process of making of a teacher, one on the reminiscences of a school headmaster and another related to how much we understand children. The series on the development of education in India continues as it covers an important period in that journey. Then there are regular columns like interview with a teacher and book reviews.

The Karnataka Crime Victimisation Survey report is based on the findings of a crime victimisation survey undertaken by Azim Premji University with the assistance of independent field investigators in 2017. The main objective of the survey was to understand the scope and nature of crime in the state and to analyse the extent to which the National Crime Records Bureau records capture the rate of crime in Karnataka. 

It is certainly a platitude to say that learning can happen everywhere and at all times, at the most unexpected places and moments in our lives. However, that said, we also recognise that the school is a very valuable place of learning: formally and systematically in a graded way,level upon level so that we can tackle end-of-stage examinations which help us to choose our futures. But while all this is happening, a lot of undocumented and stimulating learning is going on simultaneously,
In this issue, articles on experiential learning about the environment, reading as a means of expanding horizons as well as acquiring language skills, the morning assembly as a treasure house of the learning experience- are all here. Other articles have given detailed accounts of science as a dispeller of superstition and an enhancer of a spirit of enquiry and curiosity. Sports do more than just teach the rules of the game, suggests an article: they can internalise values, inculcate inclusion and gender equality. There is an array of perspectives on the learning within learning which, paradoxically, falls outside of it.
All in all, this issue confirms what has long been felt and known — the learning that occurs outside the classroom is as vital as the formal pedagogy which takes place inside.

Explore big questions around 4 themes: black holes, the wound healing capacity of the skin, Higgs bosons, and the matrix of life. 

Use the activity sheets in ​‘A milky way to learn biology’, ​‘What do we really see’, and ​‘Trees and seasons in a changing world’ to introduce students to thinking like a scientist, the human vision, and neighborhood trees. 

Discover how astronomers measure distances in space in our new section ​‘How do we know?’ Explore how engaging students in raising an urban terrace farm can strengthen their understanding and involvement with the local environment in ​‘Pedagogy of dirty hands’. 

Try out the concept builder from ​‘Physics for closeted Aristotelians’ to find out how well your students understand motion under gravity. 

Read our ​‘Research to practice’ section to discover how to create embodied learning experiences for students in the science classroom. Or learn more about the first image of a black hole in our section ​‘Hot off the press’.

Looking for more? Enjoy our pull-out poster on human skin and booklet on identifying 10 common trees.

Explore the ​‘Evolution’ of stars, the Earth, life, and humans through three articles for our adult readers and one short story written for young adults. 

In ​‘Annals of History’ relive the contentious process of arriving at the unexpected mathematical pattern that has become key to our understanding of the diversity of life on Earth. 

Read ​‘Research to Practice’, ​‘The Science Educator at Work’ and ​‘Teaching as if the Earth Matters’ to see how complex concepts related to energy, evolution and soil can be taught through metaphors, art and real-world experiences. 

Learn more about Lynn Margulis’s ​‘controversial’ ideas and life in science in ​‘Biography of a Scientist’. If you’d like more, try some simple classroom experiments from ​‘The Science Lab’ to understand foundational principles in Physics. 

Use the seven activity sheets from ​‘Life in your Backyard’ to introduce your students to the fascinating world of spiders. Plus, enjoy our nine pull-out posters on themes as diverse as ​‘Benthic Fauna’, ​‘The Hard Problem of Consciousness’, and ​‘Ocean Acidification’.