India’s rapid economic growth since the 1980s has stimulated further global interest in understanding its complex society. The story about contemporary India is deeper than a story of simple economic expansion. To understand how that expansion has touched the daily lives of ordinary Indians, this report highlights the way in which poverty and affluence intersect with
age-old divisions of regional inequalities, gender, caste, and religion that have long structured human development in India. Together, these economic and social forces shape each facet of Indians’ lives—their livelihoods, their children’s education, their health and medical care, the creation of new families and the care of older generations, and their entry into or exclusion from important social connections. The strength of this report is its analysis of a survey of 41,554 households jointly undertaken by researchers from the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) builds on a long tradition of household surveys at NCAER and has been designed to assess human development in a way that expands and deepens the definition of human development. The chapters in this volume use statistics from the survey to paint a nuanced portrait of contemporary India and address a wide range of debates and policy challenges.