Blog

In the past few weeks, I’ve been taking lots of field notes from my visits to the three villages in my study, and from visits with various official and government health workers. Yet, I’ve had a hard time figuring out...Read More..

I got exactly what I wanted for my birthday today: this graph! I've been working for a few months now on trying to figure out whether India's Total Sanitation Campaign is improving children's health. While I have been finding generally...Read More..

Our first post from a new blogger: rice board member, friend, and fellow development economist John Papp. For those interested in measurements of leakage from India's large public works program, Clement Imbert and my working paper Estimating Leakages in India's...Read More..

Around the world, holidays are all about the food. In my family, for instance, my dad starts mixing dough for Christmas cookies just a few days after Thanksgiving. Here in Sitapur, Holi, a Hindu holiday that celebrates the coming of...Read More..

Today I'm entering data with my handy travel-sized ten key (Diane, with any luck, is weighing babies as I write), and have enough brain space left over to listen to the BBC World Service. They just did an extended piece...Read More..

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..