Blog

An article in last month's Caravan magazine covers the progress of the Swachh Bharat Mission and provides sharp insight into some of the problems the program faces in rapidly reducing open defecation. Sagar, the author of the article, visited three places close to...Read More..

Until now, concern and action regarding outdoor air pollution in India have focused on Delhi and other large urban centers. However, 30 percent of Indians live in rural Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which satellite images show falling under...Read More..

Diane and I were at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America 2017 in Chicago this week. Diane presented her paper, co-authored with Ashwini Deshpande, Jeff Hammer and Dean, "Local social inequality, economic inequality, and disparities in child height in...Read More..

Reservation in jobs, and in academic institution is seen as one of the most delicate issues being discussed in contemporary India. Our research fellow, Nidhi Khurana, used Social Attitudes Research for India (SARI) data to address several aspects and fallacies...Read More..

We are delighted to announce that we are seeking applications for a team to carry out a new project — in partnership with 3ie and the WASH team at the Gates Foundation — that can help us learn about how to...Read More..

We are very excited to share that Dainik Bhaskar – the most widely-read Hindi newspaper in India – published an article written by Nikhil! And soon after, Satyagrah @Scroll.in published another article! We are on a roll in the Hindi...Read More..

[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..