Ongoing

The Third Way of Green Transition: Adoption of Electric Vehicles in Urban India

Research Team: Linchuan Xu, Maitreesh Ghatak, Lachi Singh Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: Electric vehicle adoption in developing countries remains understudied, despite rising motorisation and air pollution. Focusing on Telangana, India, this project uses registration, pollution, and policy data to assess how government subsidies and complementary measures affect EV uptake and environmental outcomes.

Frontiers of graduation: Building resilience and sustainable livelihoods in urban India

Research Team: Robin Burgess, Oriana Bandiera, Anton Heil, Jyoti Mukhopadhyay Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This project tackles urban poverty in rapidly urbanising Bihar, India, by adapting the Graduation Approach to the Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana programme. In partnership with JEEViKA, it refines livelihood strategies using household data and field experiments, focusing on municipal employment and cooperatives while laying the groundwork for a randomised controlled trial.

Barriers to civic action for air pollution

Research Team: Shweta Bhogale, Teevrat Garg, Patrick Baylis Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This project examines why citizens who privately value cleaner air often fail to translate concern and protective behaviour into political pressure for government action, focusing on urban India during the winter pollution season. Combining a survey experiment with incentivised belief elicitation and behavioural measures of civic engagement, it measures gaps between private and public demand for clean air, tests how beliefs about health harms, policy effectiveness, political responsiveness, and social norms suppress collective action, and evaluates whether targeted information can strengthen citizen voice in environmental governance.

The demand for cooling

Research Team: Shefali Khanna, Teevrat Garg, Maulik Jagnani, Patrick Behrer, Nilesh Kane Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: Air conditioning is one of India’s fastest-growing drivers of electricity demand. This project tests whether simple behavioural and technological interventions can help households reduce electricity use from air conditioning without compromising comfort.

Plug adoption and use for smarter energy (PAUSE) demand

Research Team: Shefali Khanna, Teevrat Garg, Zeynep Gurguc, Ralf Martin, Greer Gosnell, Nilesh Kane Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: Leveraging demand flexibility offers a cost-effective opportunity to accelerate India’s energy transition. This project examines the factors influencing the widespread adoption and use of remote-managed smart energy technologies that can reduce consumption from energy-intensive appliances at peak times.

Insurance against extreme heat: A randomised evaluation

Research Team: Pol Simpson, Amen Jalal, Weijian (Eddy) Zou, Ashley Pople Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This study evaluates a novel heat-indexed insurance scheme by SEWA that automatically compensates informal women workers in India when extreme temperatures, intensified by climate change, prevent them from working. To rigorously assess the programme’s impact as it scales to 250,000 women in 2025, researchers will use a randomised design and are seeking timely funding to begin essential survey work before memories of the recent hot season fade.

Land and wilds under glass: Socio-ecological trade-offs of solar parks in India

Research Team: Priyanka Dutta Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: India’s rapid expansion of large-scale solar parks, central to its 500 GW non-fossil-fuel target by 2030, has generated significant socio-ecological trade-offs, including land displacement, inequality, and ecological disruption. This project evaluates impacts on biodiversity, habitat connectivity, and vulnerable communities to inform more equitable and environmentally sustainable renewable energy policy.

Milking long-run benefits from nutrition: The long-term impact of operation flood on adult health in India

Research Team: Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This project evaluates the long-term health and nutritional impacts of Operation Flood, India’s White Revolution, which expanded dairy production and access to milk through cooperative systems. By linking programme rollout data with national surveys, it examines effects on adult height, stunting, and dietary patterns to understand how agricultural policy can improve human capital.

Climate risk, credit constraints, and firm productivity in India

Research Team: Subhadeep Halder, Yogeshwar Bharat Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: Climate change is increasingly disrupting economic activity in India, where rising temperatures reduce firm productivity and may tighten credit conditions, particularly for smaller manufacturers reliant on external borrowing. This project investigates how temperature shocks affect firm performance, borrowing costs, and aggregate productivity, offering evidence to guide targeted credit and climate adaptation policies that support sustainable growth and financial stability.

Spatiotemporal groundwater analysis in India: Statistically curating, integrating and modelling noisy multi-source data

Research Team: Kaushik Jana Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This project develops a comprehensive, high-resolution dataset on groundwater in India to analyse long-term trends and the drivers of depletion across regions. Using this data, it builds predictive models incorporating climate, agricultural, industrial, and domestic demand to forecast future groundwater scenarios and inform resource management.

Climate risks and index insurance

Research Team: Digvijay Negi, Bharat Ramaswami Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This project evaluates the effectiveness of India’s Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana in protecting farmers against weather-related yield risks, with a focus on cyclonic storms. Using granular administrative data, it examines insurance demand, payout accuracy and welfare impacts, and assesses how well extreme climate risks are transferred from farmers to the state.

Hunting ban, tribal settlement, and wildlife conservation: Evaluating the impact of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 on the Pardhi community in India

Research Team: Chinmayi Srikanth, Agnij Sur Funded By: India Sustainable Growth Hub (ISGH) Description: This project examines the impact of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 on the livelihoods and identity of the Pardhi community in Central India, a historically nomadic hunting group later criminalised under conservation policy. It explores how excluding traditional communities from wildlife governance may undermine both conservation effectiveness and social equity, particularly as India expands protected areas under global biodiversity commitments.

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