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Indian women also run an outsize risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, including a high rate of HIV/AIDS. One cause is that Indian men’s condoms malfunction more than 15 percent of the time. Why such a high fail rate? According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, some 60 percent of Indian men have penises too small for the condoms manufactured to fit World Health Organization specs. That was the conclusion of a two-year study in which more than 1,000 Indian men had their penises measured and photographed by scientists. “The condom,” declared one of the researchers, “is not optimized for India.”

With such a multitude of problems, what should be done to improve the lives of Indian women, especially the majority who live in the countryside?

The government has tried to help by banning dowries and sex-selective abortions, but these laws have largely been ignored. A number of monetary interventions have also been designed for Indian women. These include Apni Beti, Apna Dhan (“My Daughter, My Pride”), a project that pays rural women not to abort female babies; a vast micro-credit industry that makes small-business loans to women; and an array of charitable programs launched by a veritable alphabet soup of international aid agencies.

The Indian government has also vowed to make smaller condoms more readily available.

Unfortunately, most of these projects have proven complicated, costly, and, at best, nominally successful.

A different sort of intervention, meanwhile, does seem to have helped. This one, like the ultrasound machine, relies on technology, but it had little to do with women per se and even less to do with baby-making. Nor was it administered by the Indian government or some multinational charity. In fact, it wasn’t even designed to help anyone at all, at least not the way we normally think of “help.” It was just a plain old entrepreneurial development, called television.

State-run broadcast TV had been around for decades, but poor reception and a dearth of programming meant there simply wasn’t much reason to watch. But lately, thanks to a steep fall in the price of equipment and distribution, great swaths of India have been wired for cable and satellite TV. Between 2001 and 2006, some 150 million Indians received cable for the first time, their villages suddenly crackling with the latest game shows and soap operas, newscasts and police procedurals, beamed from the big cities of India and abroad. TV gave many Indian villagers their first good look at the outside world.

But not every village got cable TV, and those that did received it at different times. This staggered introduction produced just the kind of data—a lovely natural experiment—that economists love to exploit. The economists in this case were a pair of young Americans, Emily Oster and Robert Jensen. By measuring the changes in different villages based on whether (and when) each village got cable TV, they were able to tease out the effect of TV on Indian women.

They examined data from a government survey of 2,700 households, most of them rural. Women fifteen and older were asked about their lifestyles, preferences, and familial relationships. As it turned out, the women who recently got cable TV were significantly less willing to tolerate wife-beating, less likely to admit to having a son preference, and more likely to exercise personal autonomy. TV somehow seemed to be empowering women in a way that government interventions had not.

What caused these changes? Did rural Indian women become more autonomous after seeing cosmopolitan images on their TV sets—women who dressed as they pleased, handled their own money, and were treated as neither property nor baby-making machines? Or did such programming simply make the rural women feel embarrassed to admit to a government surveyor that they were treated so badly?

There is good reason to be skeptical of data from personal surveys. There is often a vast gulf between how people say they behave