Our Mission
CDF is a research centre. We believe that India is on a long journey to become a fully digital economy. And this will present a continuous stream of challenges and opportunities. Therefore the central theme of our research is how digitisation is impacting or can be made to impact lives and livelihoods of people. We do research and give recommendations on markets, regulations and policies, and the possible ways to structure these to best leverage digital for the people
The Approach
Our methodology is a combination of theoretical frameworks with empirical data to offer comprehensive insights into the digital economy. We first do open ended research (both primary and secondary) into the areas of interest. This helps us focus on the specific questions for further research. To have a hypothesis around these questions, we will build an economic model to give us a framework.
To build and test our framework, we will do extensive secondary research through journals, academic research papers, industry reports, government and private data. If required, we will also do primary data collection through in-person interviews or online surveys, to provide a ground-truth for testing our theories.
Thereafter we will come out with our findings, which are open to the ecosystem to analyse, criticize and provide feedback on. Based on this open feedback mechanism, we will come out with our papers and continue to engage with the ecosystem for dissemination.
The inquiries are analytical, without any pre-determined bias, multi-dimensional and evidence-based. Towards this end, we product academic research papers, white papers, policy briefs, Op-Eds and articles. We are also active in the ecosystem through conducting conferences, roundtables and capacity building workshops.
CDF is a research centre within India Development Foundation (IDF), a private non-profit research organisation setup as a Trust in 2003. We raise funds for sponsorships of research projects.
We do not make any commitments regarding the methodology or outcome of research projects, nor do we undertake any research based on a pre-conceived result or position. All research papers would be public documents to be freely used by governments, businesses, media and other stake holders as well as international entities.
