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tribal areas. The programme started in 2017 and included four verticals: increase production
through new agronomic practices, facilitate processing units, develop marketing channels,
and revive consumption including their inclusion under supplementary nutrition
programmes. This being an action research, an essential requirement is obtaining regular
feedback from different stakeholders – farmers, consumers, civil society functionaries, and
staff of line department of government among others. In the initial days of the pandemic,
with the first phase of lockdown, all this completely stopped. More importantly, colleagues,
across the board, got involved in COVID-19 related work. Subsequently, some attempts were
made through telephonic interviews and online meetings to get some feedback. This paved
the way to articulate a case to consider workers involved in agricultural activities are also
like workers involved in public utilities. This was helpful for agriculture in general, but also
for the millets initiative. By the time I left NCDS in early September of 2020, more than one
lakh farmers were associated in the programme through the production vertical.

In economics, we have been trained to incorporate learnings from statistics and mathematics,
but when it comes to fieldwork we also take lessons from anthropology. Or, as they say, “Go
and soil your dresses.” That means, go and be part of the people that you are trying to study.
That is always helpful.

In fact, in the human development course, a component of fieldwork exists and I am happy to
state that some of the students in the current batches who have opted for this course provide
us some important lessons of conducting fieldwork during this ongoing pandemic. Some of
them conducted face to face interviews, if situation permitted, but in most cases it was done
virtually. They have a rich repository of cases of the people they see around (such as vendors,
teachers, comparing public sector versus private sector professionals, people who lost jobs or
had a cut in salary, and women who have to balance between their on-line work and
increased domestic responsibility) and how has the pandemic affected their lives.

The pandemic also strengthened collaboration of researchers with network of civil society
members or teachers of schools/colleges in local areas to document the return of migrant
workers across the country, which has led to a number of publications by scholars from
across the country. There is an increasing use of social media to not only elicit responses on
one’s questionnaire, but also to use that medium as one’s field location, that is, to be a
participant observer of a forum that one is a member of. There are scholars who did some
fieldwork between the two spikes and are following up subsequently through a virtual mode.

What one foresees is that fieldwork is increasingly going to be a combination of physical-
cum-virtual mediums, more use of technology even when one is conducting physical
fieldwork, and a greater possibility of collaboration with local facilitators including perhaps
school children who may get a first-hand exposure to research. Besides, documenting the
change in the method and medium of fieldwork could also be an important area of study.

I paraphrase Jean Drèze who, as you all know, is one of the foremost development economists
in India. He had once remarked that one day’s fieldwork is equivalent to six months of library
work. The field is indeed a very intriguing space and in fact, lot of theoretical and analytical
observations can come from the field. I would suggest that those of you who are interested in
doing research, even when you are working in the corporate world as a researcher, be
familiar with your field - whatever that field may be.

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