Blog

All of us at r.i.c.e. are excited to announce our new working paper, 'Changes in open defecation in rural north India: 2014 - 2018'. The paper documents the extent of open defecation in rural areas of four north Indian states. It...Read More..

Rukmini's article, published  yesterday in LiveMint, contains some of the best data visualizations that I have seen from the NFHS-4.  She also achieves the reasonable but rare step of emphasizing that many issues simultaneously are important: height among Indian children...Read More..

On World Toilet Day, the India Water Portal published two photo essays by Prof. Sharad Prasad and Prof Isha Ray. Prasad and Ray in their photo essays –Where there are no sewers: The Toilet Cleaners of Lucknow and When the pit fills up: A...Read More..

One of r.i.c.e’s recent projects is SARI: a phone survey for Social Attitudes Research in India. A series of papers and other writings by Diane, Amit, Payal, Nazar, Nidhi, and the SARI team have shown that it is possible to...Read More..

This week, a new paper by the SARI team came out in the Economic & Political Weekly.  Here's the abstract: Through the use of new survey data, the experiences and perceptions of discrimination among Dalits and Muslims have been quantified....Read More..

William Nordhaus has won a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contribution to climate economics. In this post from Ideas for India, Dean Spears discusses Nordhaus’ work and its implications for India. He contends that India...Read More..

Starting in 2016, we began Social Attitudes Research, India (SARI), a mobile phone survey collecting data from representative samples of adults in various states across India on people’s attitudes towards social issues such as reservations, intercaste and interreligious marriage, women...Read More..

Please check out the Research page to read Dean and my new paper on child height using the NFHS-4 data.  It was just published in the journal Economic & Political Weekly on August 4th.  We discuss the improvements in child...Read More..

The Swacch Bharat Mission Grameen recently launched an advertisement campaign video with Hindi movie stars Bhumi Pednekar and Akshay Kumar. In the video the actors educate viewers about how twin pit latrines work. The ad also teaches viewers how the...Read More..

In last few decades, India has seen a declining household per capita average calorie consumption. This throws a puzzle, as over the same time people in India have gotten richer. Dean and Josephine investigate how India’s improving disease environment can...Read More..

In this short interview, Dean talks to the IDS about what motivated him and Diane to write their book “Where India Goes: Abandoned toilets, stunted development, and the cost of caste.” While the book addresses the puzzle of widespread open...Read More..

The American Economic Association is featuring a graph from Mike and Dean's paper "Neighborhood Sanitation and Infant Mortality" as their chart of the week: see it here!...Read More..

Ashok Kotwal interviews Jean Drèze in Ideas for India....Read More..

Earlier this month, Scroll published this article calling for more support for women to help them successfully breastfeed their babies.   This support includes not only compensation and time off of work, but also assistance in order to get adequate nutrition...Read More..

Check out Nikhil’s article in EPW Engage in which he explores the government’s current pilot program (Mother’s Absolute Affection, or MAA) to improve breastfeeding.  Breastfeeding is known to help children survive, providing vital nutrition and protection from disease.  Nikhil argues...Read More..

The Hindu recently compiled its list of top ten non-fiction books of 2017, and Dean and Diane's Where India Goes made the list!  They write: Coffey and Spears have come out with a deeply researched and thoughtfully written book about...Read More..