FAS Panel in the 81st Annual Conference of Indian Society of Agricultural Economics
The Foundation for Agrarian Studies curated a panel discussion for the the 81st Annual Conference of Indian Society of Agricultural Economics held at Katra (Jammu & Kashmir) from December 01-03, 2021.
Our panel was titled “Studying Rural India in the time of the Covid-19 Pandemic through Telephone Surveys: A Critical Evaluation of Methods and Findings.” The panel made an an attempt to invoke a critical discussion on the method of telephone interviews to study rural India. The panel consisted of four research papers. The first two papers critically examined various aspects of telephone surveys, including the survey design process, challenges pertaining in access to and representativeness of the respondents, and the question of data quality. The latter two papers showcased some of the findings that have been arrived at by two such telephone surveys of rural India.
Some details of the panel are as follows:
Chair: Sandipan Baksi (Director, Foundation for Agrarian Studies)
Paper i: Telephone surveys for data collection -some reflections, Rosa Abraham (Assistant Professor, Azim Premji University)
Paper ii: Building upon an Existing Database Based on Village Surveys: The Experience of Pandemic Studies Unit of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, Tapas Singh Modak (Associate Fellow, Foundation for Agrarian Studies), and Arindam Das (Joint Director, Foundation for Agrarian Studies)
Paper iii: The impact of Covid-19 on Rural Economy: Some Findings from the Pandemic Studies Unit of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, Deepak Johnson (Senior Research Fellow, Economic Analysis Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore)
Paper iv: How Farmers and Labourers in rural villages of Koraput district coped during the COVID-19 Lockdown – Results from a Phone Survey, Dr. R. Gopinath, Senior Scientist, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation)