Interview: Ashwini Deshpande on the need for Indian economists to grapple with discrimination

Ashwini Deshpande’s two most recent papers focus on gaps in how we understand India.

One points out that the much discussed Indian enigma – the fact that Indian children are often more “stunted” than children in poorer sub-Saharan African countries – cannot be discussed without engaging with caste differences within India. The other addresses a growing belief that Indian women are dropping out of the workforce because of conservative social norms.

In both cases Deshpande, a professor of economics and the founding director of Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University, and her co-authors focus on unpacking long-held assumptions, using data to point to errors in measurement or to unearth patterns that had been missed.

I spoke to Deshpande about how the idea of examining discrimination through economics has changed over the past two decades in India, why much more needs to be done to examine the biases of the field, her discomfort with the pervasive myth of “merit” in India and how she feels about being mistaken for a classical musician of the same name.

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