Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset for India (SHRUG)

The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India (SHRUG) is a new administrative data source describing socioeconomic development in India. The first version of the SHRUG describes demographic, socioeconomic, firm and political outcomes at a high geographic resolution for the universe of Indian households and non-farm productive establishments, in both rural and urban India, from 1990-2013. The SHRUG is a platform for future collaboration and data sharing between researchers working with administrative data in India. We have created a set of consistent location identifiers for all geographic locations in India from 1990-2013, and establish a methodology to extend this classification to units from future data sources. Researchers working with geographic variation in India can thus benefit from linking to the SHRUG, and can benefit other researchers by making their data available to others through the SHRUG platform. In the accompanying paper, we describe the construction of the data and the strengths and weaknesses of administrative data like these for research on economic development. We then perform several validation exercises to show that the SHRUG is consistent with other data sources. Finally, we present an illustrative data exercise on recent trends in rural and urban development. This is an archive of a prior version of SHRUG (v1.3, or Harvard Dataverse version number 3.x). Harvard Dataverse v2.0 corresponds to SHRUG v1.2. For the most recent version, please go to devdatalab.org/shrug