Blog >> Social inequalities

Psychologists and behavioral economists have long identified an "identifiable victim effect": people are much more likely to donate to help if an appeal mentions one needy person than if millions of people in need are invoked. This may be paradoxical...Read More..

Last night Diane and I went walking in Green Park, an upscale neighborhood in south Delhi. In addition to Deer Park, its main market boasts fine dining at Evergreen, A2B, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, Domino’s, and other restaurants intermingled with...Read More..

Aashish just had a paper published in EPW on the Old-Age Pension Scheme in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Take a look!...Read More..

For the past seven years I have lived away from my parents, and visited them during vacations or work trips to Delhi. Seven years ago, I moved to Chennai to study, and for the last two years, I was working...Read More..

One of India's leading newspapers, The Hindu, today carried a piece called "Unequal status tells on Women's nutrition" discussing findings from Diane, Reetika and Dean's paper, "Women's status and children's height in India: Evidence from joint Rural households". Go read....Read More..

Hello. I am Aashish, and I have just started working for rice. I spent the most of May and June being an investigator for the PEEP Survey 2013 in Uttar Pradesh, and this first post for the rice-blog is about...Read More..

Check out two recent posts on the Ideas for India blog! Dean proposes that the "height gap" between Indian and African children may be due to a "toilet gap," that is relatively poor sanitation coverage in India, and Diane writes...Read More..

We've just added two new working papers to rice's research tab. The first, by Diane Coffey, Reetika Khera, and Dean Spears, "Women's status and children's height in India: Evidence from joint rural households" examines joint rural households in India to...Read More..

I just wanted to piggy back on Avinash's post and share this link to the Wall Street Journal blog. It is an interesting story about integration at an elite private school in Delhi....Read More..

The Parliament of India passed a Right to Education (RTE) Act in 2009. One of the key provisions of this Act requires private schools to enroll at least 25% of their students from socially and economically backward groups and not...Read More..

Over the last couple of days, we’ve thought about how small is too small from a population perspective. But, in my recent fieldwork in Sitapur, I found myself asking the question, “how small is too small?” on an individual level....Read More..

Apparently, while I have been in Sitapur, a lot of people in the U.S. have started paying attention to the deaths of so-called “invisible children”: child soldiers in Uganda. I don’t know much about child soldiering in Uganda or elsewhere...Read More..

Shopping today in the market of Sitapur’s district capital city, I saw a man squatting next to a little table with sorted piles of money: stacks of change, stacks of paper bills. You might think he would be nervous about...Read More..

I’m in Delhi for a few days to present results from my Total Sanitation Campaign project at ISI tomorrow. Today I’m mainly at the Delhi School of Economics, and this morning I was chatting with Ashwini Deshpande, who has written...Read More..

Today I went to Tapti and Amrita’s village, and sure enough, I got to meet Amrita’s new daughter. Too tired to tell me the story, Amrita deferred to her mother, who shared what had happened. Amrita’s mother was busy organizing...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..