What do we know about village-level change and stasis in India?

The study documents considerable spatial variation in change and stasis in development outcomes over the decade from 2001 to 2011 (proxied by women’s literacy and child sex ratio) even across villages within the same micro-region (taluk or sub-taluk) and with similar starting points. However, neither decentralization policy / practice nor other forms of public policy has identified village-level factors that mediate the impact of policy. Although extant literature has explored spatial variation, it has not explored such variation across different micro-regions of India, nor has it used methodologies that validate explanatory inference from spatial-longitudinal comparisons. The article notes that the degree of spatial variation in change over such a short period of time is remarkably similar across different micro-regions of the country. It also proposes a tentative methodology for identifying village pairs to produce more rigorous comparative longitudinal analysis of the drivers of development change and stasis