Ashish Sedai on Water, Electricity and Female Labor Force Participation

This episode is the fifth in a miniseries of weekly short episodes featuring young scholars entering the academic job market who discuss their latest research. In this episode, Shruti talks with Ashish Sedai about his job market paper, “Piped Water: Welfare and Empowerment: Empirical Evidence From a Gendered Analysis in India.” They discuss the importance of indoor piped drinking water and its relevance to Indian women’s participation in the labor force. Sedai is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Colorado State University. His research focuses on how economic opportunities are generated and distributed in society, as well as the interplay between power and institutions, and between economic behavior and the performance of the economy.

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and this is the 2021 job market series where I speak with young scholars entering the academic job market about their latest research on India. I spoke with Ashish Sedai, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Colorado State University. He has a B.A. in economics from Delhi University and an M.Phil. in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

We discussed his job market paper titled “Piped Water: Welfare and Empowerment: Empirical Evidence From a Gendered Analysis in India.” We talked about how piped drinking water affects women’s wages and their participation in the workforce, perceptions of female productivity, the impact of access to electricity on the labor market, and much more.

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Hi, Ashish. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

ASHISH SEDAI: Hello, Shruti. It’s a pleasure to have you talk to me today. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

Piped Drinking Water and Women in the Workforce

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m really excited. I’m going to dive straight into it because you are looking at female labor force participation from multiple angles, which is a very, very serious problem in India. India, for its level of development and its size, has one of the lowest female labor force participations. Even neighboring countries like Bangladesh do so much better on this margin. I think it’s a really big problem.

I’m going to start with your paper on indoor piped drinking water delivery. This is quite intuitive, and the moment one reads your paper it immediately makes sense. You find that increasing access to indoor piped drinking water delivery increases the likelihood of women’s employment. It also increases women’s wages. It improves their health outcomes. It improves the children’s health outcomes, and so on and so forth. Can you tell me a little bit more about what’s the mechanism at play here and a little bit more about your paper?

SEDAI: Absolutely. Before diving into the mechanisms of the channel through which indoor pipe drinking water affects women’s empowerment in terms of employment, health, child health and educational outcomes, I want to first highlight why I got interested in this idea. It’s because I come from a very remote village in Manipur, one of the states in India. Growing up, my family did not have access to indoor piped drinking water. We had to go out and get water.

My mother was always occupied in doing this activity. I used to think, “Why does she have to do this every day? We use water on a daily basis, but she’s the one getting it for all of us.” Then I realized later on, as years went by, that my mother had so much potential as a woman to get employment, to be a leader, which she eventually became. That was one of the things that drove me. At that very early stage, I realized that providing access to piped drinking water is so much more convenient to women, in terms of labor and the leisure substitution that comes with it.

You have to spend less time getting water. One of the mechanisms is time saved, which can be reallocated to labor or leisure. It could be a personal choice. Secondly, access to pipe drinking water as compared to other sources of water—which is a tube wells or open wells or ponds or lakes from where you get the source of water—they have this issue of surface-level contamination.

The health aspect of surface-level contamination, associated with the time aspect of time saved to not have to go and collect water. These are the two mechanisms through which pipe drinking water affects employment as well as health. More so for women, because they are the ones who are disproportionately burdened to collect water at the household level in India.

Why Piped Drinking Water Is a Unique Reform

RAJAGOPALAN: You talk about four different ways through which this effect gets channeled. That is the impact on indoor piped drinking water on women’s employment and therefore, women’s empowerment. The first is this reallocation of time that you talked about, which is the amount of time spent on household chores is reduced, and therefore there is more time for leisure or for work. This is that Hans Rosling video where at the end of the video, he opens the washing machine that his mother has, and storybooks and books come out of the washing machine. It’s a little bit—it reminded me of that.

The second channel is that there is just better personal health, like you said, because now the surface-water contamination problem reduces to a very large extent. The third is improvements not just in the women’s health but also children’s health.

Children’s health impacts women in two different ways. One, of course, the child is sick. But the other is now it reduces school participation, so women have even less time because now they also need to look after the sick child. Fourth is overall less illness in the family, which also reduces the amount of household or domestic work that women do.

Is it fair to say that this is the very unique channel through which only piped drinking water can have this impact on female labor force participation? Other mechanisms like other kinds of subsidies, cash subsidies, or even some increases in income or work programs—none of that can quite have the same impact that this has because those programs don’t solve what is happening inside the household in quite the same way as piped water delivery.

SEDAI: Absolutely, Shruti. I think you just nailed the whole argument altogether on why piped water could be one of the most essential elements of empowerment at the household level, especially for women. It’s because there have been studies that have shown that cash transfers don’t work as much because of the bargaining power within the household between the men and women. Men taking the loans even when it is being dispersed to the women, and then women coming back to the same situation of not having enough bargaining power in the household.

The question of livelihood in India—livelihood infrastructure in India is critical in that respect, that it solves the problem within the household. The issue of children getting sick, for instance. In many remote places in India, in rural India, many children don’t live up to five years. There is high infant mortality rate, which has come down recently, but there have been historically high infant mortality rates in India.

One of the reasons for that is contaminated water. As you rightly said, the channel through which piped water affects the household is more within than an external agency pushing money or pushing cash transfers to the household. In that respect, yes, I do believe that livelihoods, the issue of livelihoods in terms of not only access to pipe drinking water but access to, say, television or electricity, in that regard is critical in solving household issues from within.

Water Supply and Caste

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s an additional problem in India, which is we have much higher levels of potential surface-water contamination because open defecation is still quite rampant in India for a country at its level of development. Normally, emerging economies almost making it to a middle-income country, open defecation should disappear. But for various reasons which have to do with ritual purity and cost, that has still not gone away. Given that surface contamination is higher than usual, this almost has this dual impact. It solves two problems in one.

SEDAI: As you rightly said, the issue of open defecation in India, and that causing surface-level contamination, is also crucial from this research study’s point of view. When you have access to piped drinking water or piped water inside the household, it helps have less open defecation. Because if you have a running water in the toilets also, it’s much more convenient than not having and having somebody always deliver water inside the toilet, which I have experienced growing up.

That is a huge aspect. And piped water in India—water per se in India is not only an economic or a logistical issue, it is a social issue. It’s a caste issue. When multiple people from different castes live together, the distribution of water becomes a challenge. There have been many instances growing up where I’ve seen families telling each other that “You should not go and drive water out of somebody else’s well because they are of a lower caste or marginalized caste and you are of a Brahmanical household or Kshatriya household.”

That also has a strong impact on who uses water and who gets water within a village or a community. In 2009, when the government of India changed the policy of National Rural Drinking Water Programme from delivering water to villages through pipe supply rather than delivering water to villages, the government came up with this idea that why don’t we just deliver water to households rather than just villages. Because whenever we are delivering it to villages, what is happening is this caste hierarchy and caste dimensions, as well as gender dimensions, become very strong, and they have a distortionary effect on equitable distribution of water resources within the villages.

Delivering piped water to the households—between 2005 and 2012, which is where my data is, the India Human Development Survey—this period of 2009, which had laid this emphasis of higher investment outlays in [National] Rural Drinking Water Programme to reach households, as well as this monitoring system, this database of who is getting water—the IMIS database that was established to monitor water access at the household level. Those provide a variation in the data that I’m using.

You see, from 2005 to 2012, there is a positive increase in access to pipe drinking water to the tune of 3.5%. So far in India’s history, it is very hard to find data sets of panel data that could show a positive margin of an increase in water access, which could be leveraged for a study like this. The data from 2005 to 2012 provides this very interesting increase in the marginal access to pipe drinking water, because of which we are able to see when there is an increase in access to piped drinking water, what is the effect on the outcomes of employment of women versus men in the household.

Also, interestingly, not only women’s farm income but off-farm income, because we as development economists do not only want to emphasize women’s farm income. Because there is this huge issue of disguised unemployment in India, where even if you provide pipe drinking water to the household, are women just redistributing their work from the household to the farm? Because that is not the developmental agenda that I wish to follow per se. But what I wanted to look at was, does it really increase wage and salaried employment, which is what could be increasing women’s bargaining power in the household.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and you find that wages increase by almost 10%. That’s a pretty big increase that you see in wages. You basically find that employment increases by about 3.3 percentage points?

SEDAI: Yes.

Household Access to Clean Water

RAJAGOPALAN: What is the situation with access to clean drinking water at the household level? How much penetration does India have for these kinds of programs? How much work is there left to do?

SEDAI: It’s a very interesting question, and there is—as we all know, there’s so much variation within India, in terms of the states differing in access to pipe drinking water. For instance, states like Karnataka or Tamil Nadu, they have stronger penetrations of pipe drinking water as compared to, say, the states of Bihar or Charcot or Uttar Pradesh. Just to give you a brief of what is happening, we could look at the access survey, which was carried out from 2015 to 2018. It’s a panel of the six poorest, most populous states in India.

The access survey shows that—it’s quite remarkable, and at the same time, very sad to see—that between 2015 and 2018, there has been no significant increase in access to pipe drinking water in those six poorest and most populous states in India, which shows where we stand with regards to access to piped drinking water. I remember having a conversation with Professor Sitaram, who is at Asian Development Banking Institute, and he said that the logistical issue of providing water to households in India is not as complicated as we think.

How much do households really need to pay for 15 cubic meters of water, which is required by a household on a daily basis? How much does it really cost to provide that, rather than the amount of money that is spent in urban areas on bottled water, which is now becoming a seasonal thing even in rural areas also? The same money could be used to buy 15 cubic meters of water for daily use for the households and could be much cheaper also. But then there are so many political, cultural and social barriers to providing water to India that we see even in times of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, that came into the non-open defecation argument that the government is pushing, the agenda that the government is pushing forward.

Even in those times, we are seeing that piped water access is something which is very hard to deliver to households. It is even more relevant now, in the sense that not even 50% to 55% of rural households at present have piped water access. I’m talking about an overestimated margin here. The problem is the same even in urban areas also, plus the surface-level contamination that is associated with urban areas.

In my study, what I find is that when you provide access to piped drinking water, diarrhea in urban areas reduces more than in rural areas, which is one of the things I discussed in one of the presentations that I had for Korea Development Institute. They asked me, “Why do we see a higher reduction in urban areas in diarrhea as compared to rural areas?” The single-point answer to that is because of surface-level contamination being lower in urban areas, we anticipate lower diarrhea in urban areas as compared to rural areas with indoor piped drinking water.

Supply and Demand for Women in the Workforce

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to walk through some of the normative implications of your paper. I recently read—there’s this great working paper by Ashwini Deshpande and Jitendra Singh on female labor force participation in India. They find something quite remarkable. This entire time, we’ve been focused on the supply-side story, that the female labor force participation in India is low because of household income, and the structure, motherhood, the amount of time spent for childcare, and so on and so forth. What they find is that it’s mostly demand-driven: that female labor force participation is low in India because the demand for women at the workplace is low.

Now, how does research like yours fit into this story? One, of course, there’s the question of level. On the margin, piped drinking water may not have an effect, but the overall levels of how many women work in India may be significantly impacted by how much time they spend at home providing water for their family. What are the other ways in which it might also affect the demand for female labor force participation?

SEDAI: Absolutely. I think the findings by Professor Ashwini Deshpande and Jitendra Singh are quite remarkable in that regard. I do have a slight concern with that argument, and it’s because the question of why less demand for women’s labor in India comes from less employability, because of the very fact that they could not have access to basic amenities which could have propelled them in the labor market. In my conclusion of the paper, I do argue that less access to piped drinking water—coming from Amartya Sen’s capability approach—lowers their ability to get good education, because they continuously miss school.

Again, the issue of menstruation for women in schools and the lack of access to clean water becomes an impeding factor for them to gain quality education. This is like a cycle which runs through. You have lack of access to amenities like electricity and water and credit for the household. That translates into lower educational attainment, lower quality of educational attainment, lesser employability in the market and earlier marriage.

These things play into that, and what we see—if we take a step back and look at the macroeconomy, we might see that, yes, employers are not demanding women labor force in their companies or in wage labor or in salaried labor. But we have to, again, go in closer, take a microscope to see why that is happening. And to be very honest, I personally think that it is because of the lack of employability, although there are cultural constraints, social constraints which are, again, supply-side.

But I think here, the channel of the demand side is also affected by supply side to a certain extent in that these household infrastructures, are critical in educational attainment. In my paper, I talk about this literature by Bartram, where he says that it is very hard to imagine, for us people living in the West, to think of why would people defecate in the open? Why would women miss schools during menstrual periods? Why would a teacher have some reservations against a girl child versus a boy child in the school? Why do girls not have girls’ toilets in schools in India? These questions are very—we can read about it, but the actual reality of it is much more devastating than what we really read about it.

Perceptions of Female Productivity

RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe I’m overreaching, but there’s a question of perception of female productivity, which will affect the demand for female labor. If the perception is that women are constantly stuck at home because their kids keep falling ill, and it’s not a reliable pool of labor because the moment the child gets sick and misses school, then the women can’t show up at work, and so on.

Overall, healthier communities—because they have greater access to piped drinking water—the perception of women’s productivity somewhere within that community is also likely to change, which I think is an interesting mechanism by which the demand for female labor will also change, right?

SEDAI: Absolutely. I think so, too. It’s also because, as you rightly mentioned, why does the perception change? It’s because of the cultural mandate that has been there in India for so long. That if somebody falls sick in the household, it’s the woman that has to go for it. If there is an educational problem in the household, the woman has to look for it. That comes from the idea that the man is the one who is doing labor and bringing income into the household. If there is any extra activity that is happening in the household, the women should be taking care of it. But where does the foundation to this lie?

The foundation to this lies in formative years for girls and boys in India. In that, you miss school, you have to—this is pervasive not only in India but say, for instance, in Nepal. In Nepal, you would see that girl child, at the age of eight or nine, they’re entrusted with this task of collecting firewood. They miss school because they have to collect firewood.

Once they do that on a daily basis, you miss school, and then you don’t pass 10th standard with flying colors. Once you don’t do that, then it’s more or less a full stop for you in terms of educational attainment. What do you expect will be their future outcomes, in a society that is so much driven by education at the primitive years and primary years?

Access to Electricity

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s a very clear, Amartya Sen-like capabilities-approach story going on in very, very early years. I want to switch to another project you’ve been working on. You’ve done similar work on access to electricity, where you also, once again, find—as one would expect—that reliable electrification or access to electricity improves the status of women relative to men, through increased employment opportunities and because there is a reduction in the time allocated to household tasks and domestic production and so on. This is, of course, your paper that’s come out in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Is the mechanism for electricity similar or the same as water? Or is it slightly different?

SEDAI: The mechanism for electricity has the health component associated to it, but not directly, which is what I’m trying to do now as a working paper, which is what I’m working on right now. I’m looking at how does electrification affect health outcomes for women in India and for children’s health and educational outcomes in India? The mechanism for electricity is the redistribution of time, just as—unlike water, which is—it’s hard to imagine in India at present having water for 24 hours running in your tap. Let’s keep that for the future.

At least for electricity per se, amidst all these popular reports that you will see in the media and through government organizations saying that India is 100% electrified, there is no problem of electrification in India. There is a paper coming out in energy policy in September, which shows that many medium and small enterprises in India still do not have access to complete electrification. Even if they have it, the quality is so low.

Now, how does it affect women? Again, the anecdote comes from my childhood because I lived in an area where electricity was present only for four hours a day. Everything related to what we could do with electricity, such as pressing our clothes, such as watching TV for some time, such as reading for us, came when only electricity was available in the household. Imagine, we did not have electricity from 5:00 PM until 12:00 PM at night. We had to reallocate everything that we did just to manage how many hours of electricity we could have and what we could do with that. The time-reallocation idea for women still holds for electricity, as it holds for all kinds of livelihoods in the household. The other thing with electricity is also knowledge that comes with electricity.

It’s not only about having electricity, but it’s about being able to go out of your household when the village as a whole is electrified during the evenings. When you don’t have electricity, you don’t have this ability. In an Indian society where it’s very hard for women to go out in the dark, having electricity means so much to them. In terms of you want to take a stroll after dinner, if there is no electricity in your community, you’re scared; you won’t do that. If there is electricity, you can do that.

Plus, the knowledge that you get from TV. The knowledge that you get from, say, a radio that is sometimes battery charged, but electricity comes into play in radios, washing machines. Anything that runs on electricity has an effect on women’s livelihood. It affects their health; it affects their time allocation. Although the piped water and electricity do not have the same kind of channel to women’s employment, they do have a lot of overlaps in the sense that they are elements of livelihoods within the household in India.

Electricity and the Labor Market

RAJAGOPALAN: One aspect of the electrification story is, of course, it increases more time for women because they no longer need to do all their chores in a matter of a few hours. In fact, having reliable electricity might also reduce the time taken to do a lot of domestic chores. That part of the story is quite clear, and it can impact the supply of women’s labor in the marketplace.

Now, another element or another aspect of access to electricity in an area—not just in a household—is that it has the potential to increase the size of the market by increasing economic growth and prosperity in that particular area. Therefore, also increasing the potential size of the labor market, which could have a pull or a demand effect for female labor. What is going on with electrification and the demand-side story for female labor force participation?

SEDAI: There is very strong demand pull with electrification at the local level in India. That does have a strong implication for women’s employment—not only for women’s employment but overall, for even men’s employment, to that extent. It can increase productivity for employment at the local level—for instance, you could run mills. The mills that run in rural India, most of the mills, the rice mills or the other kinds of mills, these have a long-term productivity effect when you have access to electricity.

At the local level, I’m not so sure on this particular aspect, as you mentioned. I haven’t really looked into this aspect of how does access to electricity at the local level have this demand-pull effect? There would certainly be demand-pull effect like you mentioned, but how much of that would be affecting women’s employment versus electricity at the household level affecting women’s employment? Honestly, I don’t have an answer to which one would be a stronger margin.

Other Public Goods

RAJAGOPALAN: I think that’s a great area for your future research because I’m developing a fantastic research program here. Overall, you are quite interested in women’s empowerment, especially through this structural transformation part, which is women’s empowerment through increased bargaining power within the household because of increased bargaining power outside of the household.

Now, how much of that can be explained by just lack of public goods provisioning? You’ve taken care of bijli (electricity) and paani (water), but things like roads, things like safety. There’s so many aspects to how public goods have a gendered impact. It’s quite different for women and men. How much of that story can be explained?

SEDAI: One of the things that I think we might have missed in this conversation is my research on microcredit for women. I have realized that it’s not only about electricity or water that could be transformative per se. It’s also about having an economic power.

If women have economic bargaining power in the household—before coming to my paper on ROSCAs [Rotating Savings and Credit Associations] in India, I would just like to say that I personally believe that if women have this opportunity of going into the labor force, contributing something, all the other infrastructures, say at a more public level, could also improve. For instance, if there is enough economic activity in a particular locality, it could lead to better roads.

I have seen that on a personal level. Where there are different villages in remote areas in India, for instance in Manipur, where some roads are really well paved, households are economically better off than other households where roads are not well paved. Road infrastructure in India at the national level and at the state level is a state prerogative, I understand that. But that does not in any way impede local authorities or individuals to make themselves better off in terms of public infrastructures like roads or having trash cans in roads and things like that. People have done that. Streetlights. In Kerala, there have been so many instances where people have done that by themselves. I think that there would be a spillover effect of livelihoods like electricity and water.

Access to Credit and Banking

SEDAI: Now, coming to my first paper of why not only water and electricity but also economic empowerment for women. This also comes again from an anecdote that I had when I was growing. In many parts in rural India, women especially don’t have access to bank accounts.

Even if they have access to bank accounts, it is managed by the husband. One, because they lack the means to go to banks on a regular basis. Second, they don’t have enough information about it. What do women do with a little bit of money that they have? Women have some amount of money—it could be because the husband gave her some money at some point of time, or the mother-in-law gave some money, or she had some money from her parents coming into a new family or something like that.

What do they do with their money? It’s a critical question. These committees—there are indigenous committees in India, which have been running for forever now, since the 1900s or so. One of the first ones was registered in Tamil Nadu. The committee was registered in Tamil Nadu. There has been serious research done on endogenous microcredit in India by people like Abhijit Banerjee and Stefan Klonner and who and who not.

They have come to this understanding that microcredit does not really affect a household’s welfare. I began to think, why does it not affect household welfare, especially women’s welfare? As I had seen myself that it really improved women’s livelihoods in rural areas. So I was of the belief that it could be that when we are looking at microcredit from a macro lens, we are looking at microcredit of both provided by the state—just as what happened in Andhra Pradesh, 2005, 2010—versus the microcredit that germinates within the society.

Now, in my research, what I’m looking at is the microcredit that germinates within the society. I build a Nash equilibrium model, where I put this condition that there are private benefits to women for joining private ROSCAs, which are called committees. And the household bargaining model very clearly shows that if a household saves in ROSCAs, if women save in ROSCAs, it increases their bargaining power relative to men in the household. This little money that they have, they can channel it within their society, within their community, within rural areas, and there is a possibility for them to have some bit of cash for day-to-day expenditures.

Once they have that, and they don’t have to rely on their husbands for money on a daily basis or to ask them, “Do I have, can you give me this much money for that? Can you give me this much money for something else?” That independence is critical in women’s decision-making, not only for that particular reason but for everything else in the household. Once she establishes the fact that I am somebody who can manage money—I am somebody who can decide what to buy, when to buy, how to buy—that is one of the key elements that reminds her of the economic bargaining power, economic and social bargaining power in the household.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is actually sometimes even quite basic. I was having this conversation with Krish Ashok about cooking and cooking gadgets and appliances, and women not having agency over the household budget to decide what to spend on. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a better dishwashing soap or a better dishwashing pad, but that translates into many more hours of manual labor versus when the woman of the house has agency to decide what tools she wishes to have in the kitchen. These seem like very small decisions.

You would imagine they don’t have this enormous impact, but part of controlling the household budget starts affecting all of these things. I think in that sense, your story about microcredit and your story about both electrification and access to pipe drinking water, they seem to have their low-hanging fruit. They seem to have this really enormous impact on women’s day-to-day lives. I think that’s a very interesting way of thinking about many of the gendered problems that we have in India.

Pandemic Activities

RAJAGOPALAN: On a different note, I know you’re quite far from home, though I believe Colorado is almost as beautiful as Manipur. But how have you been doing over the pandemic?

SEDAI: The pandemic had me working on papers. It was a tough time, very honestly, because we didn’t have our family here. Our family lives in Manipur and in some parts in Bangalore; my brothers live in Bangalore. There was so much news coming out of India. The second wave that came out with the oxygen issue and everything, it got us disturbed, to be very honest.

It got us feeling that—what can we do when we are sitting here in a safer environment as compared to what my family is going through? We could imagine, when pandemic hit Manipur, for instance, and the lack of hospitals therein made us also feel—what can you say—helpless and scared to a certain extent. My father had COVID. He came out of it somehow, and luckily, my family otherwise did not really have COVID.

We did not really want to go out, especially in the evenings and things like that. We had to redistribute the time again. What we want to do and when we want to go out for a bike ride or when we want to go for a run, this also changed because of COVID and everything. Luckily in Colorado, the infection levels did grow, but it subsided eventually. It was not one of the worst-affected states in the United States.

I listened to a lot of music.

RAJAGOPALAN: Tell me more. What have you been listening to during this time?

SEDAI: I listen to Sixto Rodriguez. I don’t know if you listen to Sixto Rodriguez. I think he is a beautiful singer. I do listen to a lot of Radiohead, and I tell my students, “Don’t listen to Radiohead because it makes you dull.” I play a lot of soccer, and I watch a lot of soccer. I am an enthusiast with respect to soccer. How about you? What do you do?

RAJAGOPALAN: Well, I think during the pandemic, I think my Netflix and TV consumption has certainly gone up. I’ve been cooking a lot more during the pandemic, which has been a joy. Speaking of soccer, one recommendation I have is “Ted Lasso.” It’s this TV show on Apple TV, and it’s about an American football coach who has ended up in England in one of the English Premier League teams to coach soccer. It’s a really sweet, sort of hilarious show. I would recommend that given your love for soccer.

SEDAI: Absolutely. I would like to watch it also.

RAJAGOPALAN: Thank you much, Ashish, for taking time to do this. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

SEDAI: It was a pleasure to talk to you also, Shruti. I am really happy that you thought my profile should be considered for this podcast. Thank you.