Blog

This is what he has to say! Had he a head for anything other than the trivial, Modi would not have been looking for film stars (and comprador Congressmen) as “brand ambassadors”, but summoning the hard working authors of the...Read More..

Atish Patel, while writing for the the Wall Street Journal’s India blog “India Real Time” just wrote an article covering rice research on sanitation. Here are some quotes from the article: The answer though, sanitation experts say, doesn’t lie only in building more...Read More..

The BBC just wrote an article featuring a lot of r.i.c.e. research. Check it outhere. Here are some quotes from the article: A staggering 70% of Indians living in villages – or some 550 million people – defecate in the open. Even...Read More..

Ajai Sreevatsan of The Hindu in his meticulous analysis of the profligate sanitation programs in India, uses SQUAT survey and argues that constructing toilet alone is not enough. He says “The Swachh Bharat mission would place overwhelming emphasis on constructing...Read More..

Nikhil’s article for the magazine GovernanceNow, which provides a very neat summary of a lot of our research in a very compact and easy to read format, is now available online. See here. However the online version does not contain the...Read More..

We are presenting SQUAT and Switching Study results at the UNC Water and Health Conference. Many of our sanitation related posters are also a part of the poster presentations. If you are there, we would be happy to talk to...Read More..

Author, diplomat and Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor recently wrote an NDTV blog on sanitation quoting liberally from r.i.c.e. research! Here’s what he says: As Health Minister Harshvardhan has pointed out, poor sanitation breeds infections and leads to major public health problems;...Read More..

Chaitanya Kalbag wrote a very interesting column in the Economic Times, the world’s second largest english business daily, on the day of the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission, quoting us quite a bit. We thank him! He said, [The] government pledged...Read More..

The India today’s cover story for this week is called “Dirty Nation”. Dean and Diane have a column for the cover story, called “To end open defecation, make Indians want to.” We reproduce the full text of the column. – Over...Read More..

  Dean Spears, our executive director, was on NDTV yesterday to discuss research and policies on open defecation in India. Check out the full video here, which includes reporting from parts of rural India as well. Dean’s segment starts 13:55 minutes...Read More..

These days, we end up writing so many articles that we miss some of them on this blog. We are sorry. One such article was by Payal, written for the cool website scroll.in. The full text of the article is appended...Read More..

If you have been looking for ideas on ending open defecation by 2019, look no further than the SQUAT Policy Brief No. 1. We have thought a lot about the ideas and action points in the policy brief, and believe that...Read More..

Check out Aashish and Payal’s article in today’s Indian Express, calling for a Sanitation Sena in India, and they made a very cool cartoon too! Sangita, Jeff Hammer, and Jayamala Subramaniam, rang in the Swacch Bharat Mission on India at 9 with Anubha...Read More..

The government has announced that the Swacch Bharat Mission is to be a mass movement to make India open defecation free in five years. By spending one lakh thirty four thousand crore rupees for the construction of about 11 crore 11 lakh...Read More..

The Government has decided that all of its citizens and the government employees will take a ‘sanitation pledge’ on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary this year. Though the biggest sanitation challenge faced by the country is its rampant open defecation, it...Read More..

This week I’m in Sitapur, and it’s nice to be back after a long time.   I learn so much here.  Today, I was having a conversation about rural sanitation with Baby, a woman who long-time readers of our blog will...Read More..