From Kuznets Prize to Oxford: A Journey of Discovery

Garima expressed that she was surprised at winning the Kuznets Prize. “We were honestly not expecting to win the award! Both Anisha Sharma (my supervisor and co-author) and I were quite surprised when I saw the email telling us we had won,” she said. “For my thesis, I knew I wanted to work at the intersection of education and gender. However, it took a while to arrive at the exact research question. I was quite fascinated by the unintended consequences of well-meaning policies, such as the ban on prenatal sex determination.”

Garima is currently pursuing her second year of MPhil. in Economics at the University of Oxford. As a part of her thesis, she is working on a topic similar to her previous paper. She is looking at the role of bargaining power of women in family planning in India. Through her research, she wants to understand how women’s bargaining power affects contraception usage and the type of contraception used. She is also interested in understanding the effect of the Emergency on current family planning practices.

Arriving at Ashoka with an undecided major, the university’s liberal arts education allowed her to explore a variety of subjects before she made her decision to major in economics. “The University helped me learn about economics in the context of other fields such as history, political science, and mathematics,” she explained.