Blog

Happy Valentine’s Day! This is a holiday that doesn’t really exist here in conservative, rural Uttar Pradesh. I was able to find a Valentine’s card in Lucknow last week, when I was visiting the state UNICEF office.The holiday was an...Read More..

Starting from where we live in Sudamapuri, you get to the village of Terwa Chilaula by first taking a bicycle rickshaw into Sitapur, the district capital town. Near the main bus stand, turn north along the road to Lakhimpur, the...Read More..

Children get diarrhea from many things; one is, as Dean has pointed out, contact with human feces. Part of the focus on weaning in the analysis of child growth has to do with the possibility of children contracting bacteria by...Read More..

This morning I got the email I get from time to time with statistics about downloads of my papers, and was surprised to find that the two I had publshed with the Berkeley Electronic Press were not on it. After...Read More..

It’s getting warmer here in Sitapur, so Diane and I have bought bicycles and I’ve been tentatively venturing out of my sleeping bag. Up until now, I’ve been huddled with my computer and kleenexes, trying to get a handle on...Read More..

It has long been thought that an important determinant of adult height is the environment in which a child grows up. Children who grow up in environments free of disease and with access to good nutrition will be taller, on...Read More..

  An important puzzle that surrounds child malnutrition is that despite being on average richer than children in sub-Saharan Africa, children in India have worse indicators of nutrition. They are, on average, shorter and thinner than children of the same...Read More..

This time next week, Diane and I will be back in India. For now, I’m blogging from a hotel room near the American Economic Association conference in Chicago. Avinash is napping – recovering from a long day of interviews –...Read More..

Last week, I wrote about our trip to a village on the border of Madhya Pradhesh and Uttar Pradesh, south of Allahabad city. The day was so full of interesting stories that I’m going to share another one. We hadn’t...Read More..

In November, Dean and I visited friends in Allahabad, who took us to some villages on the borders of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Crossing the border from Shakargarh, in southern Uttar Pradesh, into Madhya Pradesh, we noticed a decline...Read More..

Putting Growth in its Place, by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen: "It has to be but a means to development, not an end in itself." *** New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and India's leading political commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta...Read More..

A combine harvester, or combine, is a machine that harvests food crops like paddy, wheat, maize and soybean. It combines three separate operations, reaping, threshing and winnowing, into a single process. Combines are giant machines; bigger than anything you see...Read More..

Lack of adequate power supply constrains economic growth and affects quality of life across India. But nowhere is the problem as severe as it is in my home state, Bihar. Bihar, a state of more than a 100 million people,...Read More..

Last week Diane, Avinash, and I spent some time in a village in north Bihar. At the first glance, the village had some very useful public facilities – decent roads, subsidized food, and at least three schools. But, a little...Read More..

On a recent trip to Bihar, Dean, Avinash and I had the opportunity to visit a PDS dealer in Muzaffarpur district and ask him about the new cupon system for the Public Distribution System (PDS) in Bihar. The PDS is...Read More..

  For the past month and a half or so, Diane and I have been in Delhi. We've made friends with the great people at the Delhi School of Economics and with the folks at NCAER who bring you my...Read More..