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I also do qualitative work on language endangerment - more here.

Working Papers

Who Lends When it Floods? NBFCs, Banks, and Household Liquidity in India
With Sankalp Mathur. Last presented: ESCB RCCC Workshop, Banco de Espana, 2025, Madrid ES. [PDF] We examine whether non-banks fill credit gaps following climate shocks. Using the August 2017 floods in two Indian states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, as a plausibly exogenous shock, we combine georeferenced flood-extent data with a novel, near-universe panel of Indian retail credit data. A difference-in-differences design, comparing non-banks and banks across flooded and unaffected pincodes, reveals that non-banks expand lending by 5.75% in affected areas relative to banks, alongside broader borrower outreach.

Does One District One Product Deliver? Evidence from a Subnational Industrial Policy
With Gopal Krishna Roy. R&R at the BE Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. This paper studies the economic effects of the One District One Product (ODOP) programme, a subnational industrial policy implemented in Uttar Pradesh, India. Using repeated cross-sections of establishment-level data from government surveys of unincorporated enterprises, we construct a novel district–industry panel and implement a difference-in-differences design to estimate the programme’s impact on gross value added, employment, capital, and firm counts. We find little evidence of robust positive effects on these outcomes in the short run.

Policy Work

Language Endangerment and Culture Loss - A Case Study
Social Policy Research Foundation, 2022. [Stub at SPRF website.] [PDF.] [Slides.] [Bib.] This study attempts to analyse the cultural impact of language loss in Tai Khamti speakers, an endangered language community native to North-Eastern India. Primary data is collected to assess cultural markers relating to linguistic maintenance, indigenous knowledge and documentation, linguistic cultural markers, and narrative forms. The analysis of this data provides insight into culture loss through linguistic endangerment in North-Eastern India and the broader intersection of language and culture.

Work in Progress

The Himalayan Tightrope: A High-resolution Study of Economy-Environmental Tradeoff of Infrastructure Development
With Riju Garg. Last presented: Kautilya Colloquy, 2024, Hyderabad IN. This paper uses modern high-resolution data on growth and environmental degradation to analyze the trade-offs between economic development and ecological conservation amidst infrastructure development in the northern Himalayan region. We use novel satellite-based data sources to capture highly localized effects of development and attempt to investigate the micro-level tradeoffs currently being made in building infrastructure in sensitive biomes.

Development at Crossroads - Lessons from Road Development in Afghanistan
With Ankit Bhatia. Transport infrastructure assumed a strategic priority only next to defense and military expenditure in the Afghan reconstruction project post the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001. This paper explores the political economy challenges of aid-funded development in fragile settings. We identify poor contracting mechanisms, the nexus among insurgents and middlemen, and weak state capacity as three primary political economy factors causing the collapse of strategic road infrastructure in Afghanistan.

Talks

Using deep learning to classify court hearings.
At xKDR Forum. July 2024. A large proportion of hearings in the Indian court system are non-substantive, in that they do not yield progress in the case. In the era of digitized court data, researchers now have access to millions of court orders, the text of which allows them to understand whether a particular hearing was substantive or otherwise. I provide a study of different AI/ML methods for text classification at scale, involving shallow and deep learning methods as well as a cost comparison to LLMs. I find that labelling data has decreasing marginal returns, allowing for deep learning to theoretically be more efficient than LLMs for judicial data.

Understanding Language Endangerment and its Policy Implications.
Online by the ST & SC Development, Minorities & Backward Classes Welfare Department, Government of Odisha. December 2023. [Event link.] [Slides.] This presentation was delivered to the Department of SC/ST Welfare at the Government of Odisha. It is intended for a generalist audience curious about the linguistic diversity and richness of India, and interested in the challenges and opportunities for language maintenance and revitalization. It is also a useful resource for policymakers, educators, researchers, and activists who are involved or interested in language planning and development.