Tenth Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference (2015)

Spur of the moment web archiving is near impossible for most libraries or individual scholars to manage. Most projects need to be planned out months or years in advance. This paper discusses an ongoing project to archive web traces of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake using the tool Archive-It. We discuss both the merits and challenges of this recent project, and suggest that the growing field of disaster management should incorporate web archiving methods of preparation along with more standard techniques of on the ground physical forms of preparation.

A large literature studying Domestic Violence (DV) has documented a complex relationship between intimate partner violence, domestic risk factors, women empowerment and health outcomes. In this paper we attempt to disentangle this complex relationship using data drawn from Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, 2011. Empirically, a two-equation system is estimated, where the first equation models the relationship between domestic violence and health outcomes (physical injuries) whereas the second equation models the relationship of domestic violence to domestic risk factors and women’s empowerment. The study finds evidence that both education and cooperative environments lessen the likelihood of violence. Additionally, a number of household and cultural factors influence DV including alcoholic husband, multiple unions and religion. Finally, in terms of health outcomes we find that the likelihood of facing all the negative health outcomes increases exponentially with higher intensities of violence.

After a brief discussion of mountain economies in general and their disaster proneness in the first section, the second section deals with the mountain regions in the Indian Himalayan regions that are vulnerable to various disasters. The third section, in particular, deals with one of the mountain states of India namely, Uttarakhand that has witnessed many disasters and the worst disaster occurred in June 2013, entailing enormous loss of human and animal lives and devastation of property and infrastructures. The fourth section examines the damage and need assessment of June 2013 disaster and fifth section describes the pain and sufferings of people that have come out distinctly from discussions of the disaster affected people during field visit. The sixth section analyses the issues relating to rehabilitation and recovery policy measures and the last section concludes by suggesting policy measures from short, medium and long term perspectives.

Using across-district variation in schools constructed and differences across cohorts affected by school construction, I evaluate the effect of school construction of 1950s on educational and infant health outcomes. I find that 1 new school increased ability to read and write by 1.8 and 1.9 percentage points among males and also reduced infant mortality. Using school construction of 1950s as instruments, I find that father’s ability to read reduces infant mortality.

This paper is a pioneering study of investigating effects of farmers’ perception of climate change on their willingness to pay (WTP) for a weather-index crop insurance in Nepal. We use contingent valuation data collected from a primary household survey conducted in Bahunepati, Nepal to examine the topic. The research improves on the previous literature by analyzing two crop insurance products which incorporate both crop and livestock.

To study how the household conditions affect a child’s school going decisions in Bangladesh, we turn to data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). We examine proximate factors associated with school dropouts by developing OLS and probit models to see if our models can explain the Bangladesh DHS data well. We pay special attention to any differential effects of the gender of the household head or across regions.

In our research, we focus on three action arenas: village development, agriculture and forestry. The reason for this is that adaptation capacity is a function of both the intensity of the impacts caused by climate change and the resources to which a community has access and entitlement. Local development therefore is a key issue in increasing adaptive capacities, and in this area the relevant government organizations are the Village Development Committee (VDC), the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation (MFSC). In each of these ministries and departments, we conducted several key informant interviews at all levels of the organization, from the head offices to the field outposts. We also conducted long open-ended interviews in the villages.

Migrating to resource-abundant Gulf countries under short-term contracts represents a very lucrative labor market option for many young individuals in South Asian developing countries, for which higher educational qualifications are not often demanded. In this context this paper studies whether access to low-skilled jobs in construction and service sector leads to a reduction in schooling investment.

By applying a three-stage behavioral game theoretical set up, we develop private tutoring game models using the key stakeholders comprising the higher authority of both public and private schools, teachers involved with private tutoring, and the parents. Our preliminary results reveal that teachers’ dutifulness increases with salary but with professional development, the result is ambiguous.

We estimate the impact of an increase in the number of schools on educational outcomes in Nepal. We combine the between-district differences in number of new schools with variation in exposure to these schools created by the virtue of individuals being of school-age. Our results and back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that on average the increase in the number of schools can explain about a third of the total differences in the reading and writing abilities for the treated and control groups of women. These results underscore the continued importance of increasing access to schooling in developing countries like Nepal.