BackgroundDuring three multi-segment visits to India, Professor Gerard Parr will visit Institutes of Technology in Madras-Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The purpose of the visits are three-fold in order to:-.(i) develop parallel research proposals on NGN Management to the Indian Department of Science & Technology and EPSRC with Professors Timothy Gonsalves and Mani Subramanian (IIT Madras).(ii) develop plans for future collaborations on architectures and protocols for resource-constrained SLA-convergence in NGNs, taking into account e2e requirements across the fixed-wireless boundaries. This will be between Professor Kumar (IISc Bangalore), Prof Asoke Talukder (IIIT Bangalore) and Professor U.B. Desai (IIT Bombay) and Professor Surendra Prasad (IIT Delhi). (iii) build upon previous and existing collaborations between UK and India to assist in the investigation and development a unique consortium-based research and technology-transfer Centre of Excellence in NGNs/ICT.Leading on from (iii), as a result of an excellent workshop event in Madras, the challenge now is to maintain the momentum with all the interested academics and industrial players who participated in the discussions and technical presentations and to develop an agreed programme of work that will represent the interest of the UK and Indian consortium that was established. The intention is that the programme will help identify and develop priority research areas and seek out relevant funding mechanisms to actively encourage leading researchers and companies to pursue innovative research and technology transfer. Such a research aganda will power the next generation of communications technology and usher in a new era of ICT research and technology transfer between Britain and India, the world's second fastest growing economy. This is very much in keeping with the recent 2006 Budget Statement from the UK government to ensure the UK can maintain its goal as a competitive centre for global investment in technology-led sectors .Context for ProposalPreviously, the Technical Workshop (as evidenced in the appendices) was developed, planned and organised by Professor Parr on behalf of the EPSRC/British High Commission in India in response to a desire to further academic research and technology transfer collaboration between the UK and India. The proposal was based on previous meetings and discussions organised during British High Commission (Delhi) UK-India ICT visits (8th-14th January 2005) and subsequently. These visits included top research Institutes of Technology (Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai) and key companies in the ICT sector within India, including Wipro, InfoSys and Sasken Communications. The background to these visits was to determine the level of interest and capability to develop a more in-depth UK-India collaborative effort in ICT, particularly concerning the fixed-wireless interface and its management. For the past twelve months under the invitation of EPSRC and the British High Commission in Delhi, Professor Parr has established a UK-India advisory group which has been formulating the development plan between the two nations. In the activity, Professor Parr has been designated the UK Consortium Academic Lead.

We expect the long-term beneficiaries of the research outcome to be the underemployed, low skilled population, including a significant number of women. It is this group who could potentially increase their livelihoods if policymakers could design better industrial policies to generate a larger number of employment opportunities for this group. In addition, by understanding better the characteristics of employees and their productivity, we anticipate that this research will aid human resources and management decisions at the firm-level and better tailor jobs to specific segments of the population. In pursuing high-quality research, a major target audience is the academic community. The outcome of the study will influence our understanding of productivity differences within countries, crucial to understanding how to generate economic growth. With analytically-driven, evidence based results we hope to assist donors, in prioritizing interventions that can achieve higher returns, thus helping to create a more efficient foreign aid establishment. - Strategy and methods for engagement of policy makers throughout the project: We intend to engage with policymakers at various stage of the project. To reach out to policy makers, we will produce a policy brief to be disseminated, invite high-level administrators to conferences where research will be discussed at conferences, as well as directly interact with relevant government authorities about the research findings. To promote policy output among the research community, we expect to have our results published in a highly respected peer-reviewed journal of economics, thus exposing numerous researchers to the ideas influencing further research and the methodology underlining it. Furthermore, the research will be presented at various relevant economic seminars. We aim to promote the research extensively within our research network associations with SME Initiative at Innovations for Poverty Action, Ideas42 as well as other formal and informal channels in various government and non-governmental organizations in which our research outcomes are used to inform policy decisions - Monitoring and Evaluation of Impact Plan activities: First and more long-term - the findings will be shared with policy makers via conferences, policy briefs, communication (and maintained relationships) with multilateral agencies, government (national and local) as well as employers' representatives, and could eventually translate into an industrial policy. Second and immediate - the direct beneficiaries, who are the people targeted to work as data entry operators, will undertake a training and obtain a certificate whether they are selected or not for the job. Third, the research methodology itself will add to the growing practice of Randomized Control Trials experiments, adding to the knowledge and understanding of this methodology as a rigorous and increasingly recognized approach of applied research and field work (reference 1). The findings will also be disseminated during internal and external seminars, training sessions of research associates as a case study, in specialized websites (reference 2) , newsletters, policy briefs, and scrutinized by peers through academic conferences. The research outcomes will stand as an invitation for further specific research projects in the development field using this rigorous methodology as well as focusing on these particular aspects of labor productivity, work organization and self-selection in the context of developing economies.

We propose to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of one of the most ambitious recent attempts by a developing country government to improve education governance at scale. The evaluation will have a particular focus on the state of school governance, processes and learning outcomes in rural tribal areas, which have been one of the most challenging contexts to improve education in India. The Madhya Pradesh (MP) School Quality Assessment (MPSQA) intervention is a comprehensive program that aims to improve school governance and outcomes through a combination of (a) regular monitoring of schools, (b) creation of school report cards, and a customized school improvement plan, (c) quarterly follow-ups on progress against this plan, and (d) leveraging of ICT tools to collect and report real-time records of all assessment results, school improvement plans, and follow-ups to a dedicated online system. The PI's have worked with the project implementation team and have successfully randomized the rollout of the program across ~20,000 schools in the 2015/16 school year. The government is currently hoping to universalize the program to cover all 120,000 schools in MP by 2019. The timing of the evaluation is ideal: finding positive results may help accelerate the scaling up across MP and elsewhere in India, while not finding significant positive results (along with data on intermediate factors to understand reasons for non-impact) may prompt a re-evaluation of the program and its implementation before spending resources on a scale up that may not have the desired impacts on processes or outcomes. The evaluation will assess the effects of the program on key process metrics (e.g. teacher absence, effort and pedagogy) as well as student academic outcomes for two years. The proposed evaluation will focus on the randomized state-wide rollout of the program in 2015/16 and seek to answer three core questions: (a) How do school-level processes, inputs, and learning outcomes differ within the public education system between remote tribal areas and other parts of the state?; (b) To what extent does the MPSQA intervention improve school-level processes and learning outcomes in the program schools and does this differ between schools in remote tribal areas and other parts of the state; and (c) What are the pathways through which program effects are realized and inhibited (examples include improvements in teacher effort, in better school management, in better-focused pedagogical practices, and student attendance and effort)? In answering these questions, we will seek to use extensive administrative data including state-wide low-stakes assessment results, alongside independently-administered tests and detailed process metrics collected through regular unannounced school visits to a randomly-selected subset of schools at both elementary and secondary levels. These independently-administered tests will guard against the possibility of manipulation of official test results in program schools and also allow for the linking of test results, through careful test design, to other assessments in India and internationally. The core proposal and the study design are based on the use of quantitative impact evaluation methods using survey data. However, recognizing that large system-wide reforms often have unanticipated facets and multiple layers of interaction between different agents and different levels of governance, we also propose a qualitative component which seeks a complementary nuanced understanding of (a) the context in which the intervention operates, in terms of the interactions, perceptions and motivation of the relevant agents in the education system (students, teachers, headmasters and education civil servants) (b) how the program effects are mediated through these various layers of the education system and learning about what the 'enabling factors' or bottlenecks of such reforms might be.

The rapid growth rate of India's urban areas is a clear sign of its recent economic progress. One third of India's 1.1 billion people live in Indian towns and cities which are growing in varying and complex ways. The rapid demographic growth in and around India's urban areas is changing the physical dimensions of the city, such as its size, shape, density, land uses, layout and building types: a complex mixture of numerous characteristics including infrastructure and transportation. Increased urban development is putting intense pressure on existing urban infrastructure to support residents' quality of life. Rapid urban growth can take the form of high-density urban forms which are associated with poor living conditions, high levels of pollution and high incidence of crime. Urban growth and associated changes in urban form are clearly unsustainable, further exacerbated by (and contributing to) problems including regional displacement of rural populations into urban areas and localized social inequality.While there is growing awareness of these issues in India, gaps exist in urban policies and there is a lack of clarity in mechanisms for implementing development and planning policies at the local level. The main contributory factor of such gaps in policy is the dearth of knowledge and understanding of how the urban environment affects social sustainability, i.e. residents' wellbeing, quality of life and everyday life, in India's cities. There is therefore an urgent need in India for empirical evidence examining socially sustainable urban form to develop evidence-based government strategies and urban development policies. CityForm-India is a proactive research network aimed at addressing this need now. CityForm-India is a network of academics, policy makers and key stakeholders in the field of urban sustainability. The aim of the network is to create and sustain an exchange of international knowledge and expertise on aspects of culture, society, economics, environment, infrastructure, drivers of urban growth and urban policies which are relevant to the provision of socially sustainable living environments for India's urban residents. This research network is led by the multidisciplinary Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD: Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE)) and aims to facilitate the sharing of experience, expertise and knowledge of network members to identify the arising research challenges and opportunities within the context of India's rapidly growing cities. Network members have extensive collective research expertise and experience from a range of disciplines including urban economics, housing policy, urban design, infrastructure, transport, health and wellbeing. Through a series of networking events, knowledge exchange and dissemination activities held in India and the UK, the network will be the foundation of long-term research collaboration between academic and non-academic UK, Indian and international members. Throughout the network, a website will be developed as an important means of communication and dissemination. This will include public access to a discussion forum, webcasts and presentations from events as well as regular emails to network members, newsletters and the provision of secure online space for the sharing of working papers. Through these and other knowledge sharing and dissemination activities, the network members will make a significant contribution to knowledge in the field of socially sustainable urban form culminating in the generation of grant proposals for future empirical research.