Manya Gupta ('25), a Political Science and Economics double major, conducted research on why many Indian households still cook with firewood despite receiving free liquified petroleum gas under government programs. Manya was mentored by Dr. Tariq Thachill (Department of Political Science) and this project was supported by the College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant. Her thesis won one of three university-wide Phi Beta Kappa Best Thesis Awards, shared the Leo S. Rowe Prize for best thesis in comparative politics and international relations, and won the Holden Furber Prize for best undergraduate essay related to South Asia.
My senior thesis is titled “Hidden Ingredients: Examining the Influence of Gender and Culture on the Incomplete Adoption of Clean Cooking Fuels in India.” It studies why many Indian households still cook with firewood even after receiving free liquified petroleum gas (LPG) under government programs like the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), which reached over a 100 million women in India. Especially as India continues to move toward a model of welfare that emphasizes direct goods provision over investment in public services, this felt important to understand. On a personal level, the project let me explore a question that lies at the intersection of many of my academic and personal interests – climate change, gender, public health, distributive politics, and South Asian governance – which made it feel like a meaningful culmination of my time at Penn.
This thesis turned out to be the most rewarding academic experience I’ve had at Penn. From coming up with a research question, to applying for CURF funding and IRB approval, to designing a mixed-methods approach that involved both fieldwork and large-scale data analysis, carrying out a large project from end-to-end felt like a bigger challenge than any research I had done as part of bigger teams in the past. To generate my quantitative results, I had to clean and analyze messy data to test very specific hypotheses, applying skills from my economics classes to questions of my own. For the qualitative section, I was conducting interviews in Hindi in villages near my hometown, which forced me to adapt on the spot and think carefully about how to build trust with my interviewees. One of the hardest parts, though, was learning to share my results and writing while it was still in progress. I usually only show professors my writing once a paper is fully complete – this felt way more personal and way more vulnerable.
One of the most meaningful things I took away from this experience is how much I enjoy connecting big, abstract questions about ethics and health to the messiness of real-world policy implementation. Doing this work has made me feel more confident in my academic foundation and in what I want to do moving forward. I’m hoping to use the skills I developed—both technical ones like coding in R or conducting field interviews, and softer ones like receiving feedback, working independently, and navigating ambiguity—in the international development and global health space after graduation.
Writing a thesis is hard and very humbling at times, but it is also deeply rewarding as a learning experience. I would really recommend writing one if your schedule allows!
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