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[caption id="attachment_29424" align="alignnone" width="474"] photo credit: Nikhil Srivastav[/caption] On October 2nd, 2014, the prime minister of India announced his ambitious target of ending open defecation in India by 2019. Now, two and half years after the prime minister made the...Read More..

Congrats to Dean and Diane for winning the Joseph W. Elder Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies for their soon-to-be-published book Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development, and the Costs of Caste.  The prize is named after...Read More..

Swachh Bharat Mission since its inception has been facing a drought in terms of policy solutions. Given that 2019 is the target for achieving an open defecation free India, the program has already lived half of its life and yet...Read More..

Payal, Dean, and Diane's article, "Can collective strategies motivate behavior change to reduce open defecation in rural India?" was recently honored with the Jeroen Ensink Memorial Prize from Waterlines Journal.   See the announcement and full paper here. The award was...Read More..

I'm pasting below a list of practical action ideas that Robert Chambers has proposed after the pit emptying demonstration in Warangal. These are activities that governments and organizations can take up alike, to break down taboos around pit emptying related to caste and...Read More..

At the start of the new year, we were excited to see forward momentum on the national maternity entitlements program: the prime minister announced that the program would be made universal and cover all districts beginning January 1st, 2017 (up...Read More..

The Times of India reported yesterday that the Secretary of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Param Iyer, emptied a latrine pit in Warangal district yesterday. Read why r.i.c.e. believes this is an important step forward in our op-ed in The...Read More..

Accountability Initiative has released its 2017 budget brief report on SBM-Gramin.  According to the report, GOI allocation of SBM-G have increased over threefold since 2014-15. In FY 2016-17, 98 percent of the total expenditure incurred between April and January 10...Read More..

Influencing the beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors of others through research is tough, and often unsuccessful. But this reader's comment on Diane's recent article in The Hindu on women eating last inspires us to keep on trying....Read More..

Our article on pollution, latrine pits, and untouchability has been published in this week's EPW! This article discusses the findings of the Switching Study, which we started several years ago. So it's great to finally see this in print! India has far higher open...Read More..

The Hindu just ran a four-part series covering the Social Attitudes Research for India (SARI) Survey. SARI uses a sampling frame based on mobile phone subscriptions, random digit dialing, within-household sample selection, and statistical weights to build representative samples of adults...Read More..

r.i.c.e. has recently launched the Social Attitudes Research in India (SARI) phone survey to track social attitudes over time and experiences of discrimination on the basis of gender, caste, and religion in India.  We study discrimination and social exclusion because...Read More..

Mike Geruso, member of rice's board, was the presenter yesterday at Penn's Business Economics and Public Policy seminar series. He presented his research on "Upcoding: Evidence from Medicare on Squishy Risk Adjustment", co-authored with Timothy Layton. I have read Mike's...Read More..

Nikhil's new article in scroll is now online. The article explains the link between India's open defecation problem and manual scavenging. Nikhil has tried answering some of the critical questions that the problem of open defecation poses for us. Read...Read More..

We are delighted to announce that a grant window -- in partnership with 3ie and the WASH team at the Gates Foundation -- is now open for projects that can help us learn about how to promote the use of...Read More..

Today, the Hindu published an op-ed by Amit Thorat and Sonalde Desai that uses India Human Development Survey data to discuss poverty and social safety net programs in India.  Check it out here!...Read More..