Blog

(Part of the Bus Rapid Transit Corridor in Sheikh Sarai in Delhi.  Photo: RV Moorthy) If you haven't already seen it, do check out Aashish and Karthik's wonder op-ed on public transit in today's Hindu.  It talks about how lack...Read More..

Anil K. Rajvanshi, an Indian academic and the Director of an agricultural institute in Maharastra, recently wrote an article titled ‘The Un-Swachh Truth’ in the Huffington Post. The points which the author takes up in the article resonate with our...Read More..

The government's plans to monitor toilet building as a part of the Swacch Bharat Mission were highlighted this week in USA Today.  The article quotes from the SQUAT report to make the point that simply building toilets will not be...Read More..

Diane got bit by a dog a little the other day.  She's really quite fine, it was nothing.  There is every reason to believe this dog doesn't have rabies, but we decided to get Diane the post-exposure prophylaxis (she already...Read More..

This afternoon in Washington DC, IFPRI will release its new 2014-2015 Global Food Policy Report.  The report covers an impressive range of important topics.  Among them, is a chapter that I was honored to be asked to contribute, in collaboration...Read More..

I'm often asked why I work in India rather than other places.  When I answer that it is substantially because there are so many people here, people sometimes react as though that is bafflingly irrelevant. I'm thinking of this today...Read More..

Dean posted yesterday about Diane's new paper in the PNAS, which showed that maternal nutrition in India was much worse than previously thought. As the abstract of the paper says, 42.2% of Indian women are underweight when they begin pregnancy...Read More..

Diane Coffey's new article "Prepregnancy body mass and weight gain during pregnancy in India and sub-Saharan Africa" was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   Diane's article is important because it shows that maternal nutrition in India...Read More..

A recent ad on Mid-day meal Scheme in India, made by UNICEF and uploaded on Youtube by Ministry of Human Resource and Development, is exciting. It shows little kids sitting together and enjoying nutritious meals offered in their schools. The...Read More..

check out Diane's recent note summarizing our field research on the exceptional persistence of open defecation in rural India, online at the CLTS knowledge hub.  As she writes, uncomfortable conversations about sanitation  policy are going to be necessary if we...Read More..

I’ll paste it below.  The concerns he raises have been at the front of our minds here at r.i.c.e. – alas, we see that “the control of infectious disease” made his list of domains in which policy-making appears disconnected from...Read More..

Our Associate Director Sangita Vyas was a panelist on DelhiDemand's show on Sanitation and waste in Delhi. You can see the show here. In the show, Sangita referred to Dean's work on sanitation and health, and on Jeff Hammer's work...Read More..

Scroll.in did a report on Aashish's paper "Reporting and incidence of violence against women in India". Check out the article here. It says, When thinking of sexual violence, most people imagine the perpetrator a stranger lurking in the dark. In...Read More..

Scroll.in, along with IndiaSpend,  had an article on anti-biotic resistance in India. We quote from the article: With gut bacteria, the chances of that happening may increase when you take antibiotics, because bacteria, like every species, evolve to survive. “The...Read More..

Thorsten Kiefer, founder & CEO of WASH United, has an article in Forbes, called "Why Innovative Campaigning Is Critical To Fixing Sanitation In India". There is a paragraph that I particularly like: Kevin Shane, a colleague from Indian innovation consultancyQuicksand who...Read More..

Without saying much, I'll post the full interview here.  Its available online on the Business Standard website here. -- Rural India is a dismal outlier when it comes to open defecation and that's a major reason for its stunted, unhealthy...Read More..