Seminar Corners of IIMB
“You should never let your fears prevent you from doing what you know is right.”
– Aung San Suu Kyi
Nayana Bose from Scripps College, California visited IIMB on 26th July 2017 and gave a seminar at classroom P12 on “Intergenerational Effects of Improving Women’s Property Rights.”
Profile of the speaker:
Nayana Bose is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Scripps College, since 2016. She has completed her PhD from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee in 2015. She has an M. A. Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her area of work is Development Economics, particularly Gender, Household, Health etc. She has published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings and World Development.
Title: Intergenerational Effects of Improving Women’s Property Rights: Evidence
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the intergenerational effects following from the positive changes in women’s inheritance rights. The amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, the law governing inheritance for Hindus, empowered unmarried daughters at the time of the reform to have equal rights to inherit ancestral property as their brothers. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy and exploit the state level variation in a woman’s exposure to the reform. Using the Indian Human Development Survey data for rural India, our results indicate that the property rights reform significantly increased women’s education between 0.40 and 0.50 years. We find no impact on the education of daughters of women exposed to the reform. On the contrary, we find a negative impact on sons’ education. This impact is more prevalent in households where the father is less educated than the mother where we see a 0.27 standard deviation significant decrease in sons’ education. For families where husbands are either equally or more educated than their wives, the sons are not negatively affected. We further explore the role of birth order and the gender composition of children to assess the intergenerational impact of this more gender equal inheritance law.
To know more about her log on to https://sites.google.com/site/nayanabose/home
Casteocracy: A millennium standard of merits and tests
Dr. Suraj Yengade from Harvard University spoke on “Casteocracy” on 19th July 2017 at P Cluster classroom. Dr. Yengade came to Bangalore to participate in a major conference organized by Government of Karnataka:
https://www.questforequity.org/about.php
Profile of the speaker:
The speaker, Dr. Suraj Yengade is currently at Harvard University where he specializes in inter-regional labor migration policies with a focus on global south migration. He is also a published author in the field of Caste, Race and Ethnicity studies. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies. Suraj Yengde is India’s first Dalit PhD. holder from an African university in the nation’s history.
He is a passionate Human Rights attorney, who is also an anti-caste and anti-racism advocate, columnist at The Huffington Post, The Indian Express, The Mexican Times, The Conversation, and The Root. His writings have appeared in the Sunday World, Mail & Guardian Africa, and Saturday Star. He is frequently invited by the media to offer expert advice on the issues of caste, migration, race relations and international law. He was featured in the Independence Day magazine of The Economic Times magazine.
His recent work with the philosopher Cornel West has received global attention and calls for unity between the African Americans and the Dalits.
Title: Casteocracy: A millennium standard of merits and tests
Abstract:
Michael Young, a British Sociologist, and Labor Party activist coined the term meritocracy in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033 An Essay on Education and Equality (1958) to vilify the growing assertion of the aristocratic elite class into the British social order. By critiquing the evolving methods of testing and grading, which defined merit, Young observed that the calculation of one’s success which was defined in the narrow yardstick of civil service oriented results. This, he argued was now breaking the traditional codes of nepotism and plutocracy of wealth—by the meritocracy of talent. Is this the case?
Then came a phase of testocracy, a term coined by an African American Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier in her provocative The Tyranny of Meritocracy Democratizing Higher Education in America (2015) which states testocracy as an aristocracy in action. A “twenty-first century cult of standardized, quantifiable merit (that) values perfect scores but ignores character.” The extreme competitiveness has put the notion of “entitlement” into the foundations of a meritocratic society that privileges the individualized merit by overlooking manifold hands that remain invisible in the individual-centric celebration of achievements. By overlooking the caste classifications in societies, the analysis thus far has fallen short to call it out loud and invariably maintained a silence on casteocracy.
