Government of Tamil Nadu x J-PAL Gender Convening Meeting
In July, I was invited to attend a “Gender Convening” Meeting organized by the Government of Tamil Nadu and J-PAL South Asia in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. J-PAL has a long-standing institutional partnership with the state government of Tamil Nadu, wherein state government departments collaborate with J-PAL affiliated researchers to design research studies on policy relevant questions. The Planning Department of the Government of Tamil Nadu is the nodal agency which coordinates with J-PAL. They were keen to organize a meeting between J-PAL researchers working on gender-related topics and government officials across a range of different departments whose work intersects with gender and women’s welfare.
The Government of Tamil Nadu has been quite proactive about designing policies to improve women’s welfare. In 2021, they released the Tamil Nadu State New Draft Policy for Women, highlighting several policy proposals aimed to improve women’s health, safety, labor market outcomes, and educational attainment. In 2022, they announced a new “universal basic income” scheme targeted at low-income women: households with an annual income below Rs. 250,000 (USD 3019) and less than five acres of land are eligible to nominate one female household member who will receive a monthly transfer of Rs. 1000 (USD 12.08). Prior research has shown that money delivered directly into women’s bank accounts, increases their control over their earnings, which incentivizes them to work, invest in their own businesses, and changes conservative gender norms about women working outside the home (Field et al. 2021, Riley 2020). Others have shown that giving cash transfers to mothers instead of fathers increases expenditure on food and a shift towards more nutritious food among poor households (Armand et al. 2020). It will be interesting to see how the impacts of GoTN’s decision to deliver the UBI transfer to women’s bank accounts unfold over the next few years.
During the Gender Convening meeting, a few J-PAL researchers had the opportunity to present their work after which government officials representing the Labor, Social Welfare, Rural Development, Urban Development, and Health Departments mentioned some of the key policy challenges they are facing. The goal was to identify potential areas of collaboration between J-PAL and the government, so that proposals can be submitted for research studies that test the effectiveness of interventions to address these challenges.
Seema Jayachandran, one of the co-chairs of J-PAL’s gender sector travelled Chennai to lead the meeting from J-PAL’s side. She presented her work on the impacts of a school-based gender-sensitization program on adolescents’ gender attitudes in Haryana, India (Dhar et al. 2022). The program involved classroom discussions on gender equality over a two year period, developed in partnership with Breakthrough India. Results from their RCT show that the program successfully increased support for gender equality among adolescents, effects were persistent two years after the intervention ended. The program is now being scaled-up across government schools in Punjab, reaching 600,000 students per year. This example illustrates the incredible potential of J-PAL South Asia’s institutional partnerships with state governments to facilitate evidence-based policy-making in India. The partnerships create a pipeline starting from co-designing policies with government stakeholders and rigorously testing their effectiveness, to scaling-up interventions which are found to be successful. Moreover, lessons from one state can be shared with other state government and scaled up quickly.
Officials from the Government of Tamil Nadu were keen to partner on research across a variety of topics related to gender. This included: reducing malnutrition and anaemia among women; interventions targeting mothers to reduce child stunting; understanding the impacts of legislation such as the Maternity Benefits Act (which increased the duration of paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 26 weeks) on women’s labor market outcomes; reducing gender-based occupation segregation; reducing loneliness and depression among the elderly, many of whom are elderly women living alone; and so on.
It was very encouraging to see how eager the GoTN officials were to open this policy dialogue with researchers and design policies to improve women’s welfare in the state. I look forward to seeing how these conversations move forward, and would love the opportunity to co-design a project with them in the future!
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