Blog

For those of you haven’t been paying attention to the uproar in India over whether school kids get Christmas off this year, we have one more thing to rejoice today: India’s “commitment towards providing transparent, effective and accountable governance to...Read More..

I’ve been worrying — to anyone who will put up with listening — that the attention generated by the Swatch Bharat Abhiyan will be diverted from lifesaving efforts to end rural open defecation, towards cleaning up litter in the markets of the...Read More..

Op-ed in Indian Express: Can India be far behind? Written by Dean Spears on November 19th, 2014 My op-ed on emissions and coal in India was published today in the Indian express.  I’ll post it below, but first this haunting photograph that accompanied Gardiner...Read More..

I’m writing mainly to post a link to Gardiner Harris’s NYT story today: Coal rush in India could tip balance on climate change.  Getting energy from coal has truly awful health consequences — I sometimes think that if I weren’t...Read More..

A recent article in the Times of India by Dilip Abreu, Pranab Bardhan, Maitreesh Ghatak, Ashok Kotwal, Dilip Mookherjee and Debraj Ray poses a rational argument against phasing out the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Here are some of the excerpts from...Read More..

I’m writing from the opening minutes of a large Unicef conference called Stop Stunting at the Taj Palace hotel in Delhi.  On my way into the hotel, I had with me an empty soda can to throw away.  The lobby...Read More..

Nidhi Khurana wrote a nice article in the live mint about the governments Swachh Bharat Mission. She also refers to the SQUAT findings in her article. You can also read the full article here...Read More..

Sreenivasan Jain: Is Swachh Bharat repeating mistakes of the past? India’s proposed toilet revolution is all set to repeat mistakes of the past Enter Ramduari in Uttar Pradesh’s impoverished Sitapur district, and the toilets stand out in their striking white newness, one outside...Read More..

Our Associate Director, Sangita Vyas gave an illuminating presentation of the SQUAT findings and discussed the importance of behaviour change and monitoring latrine use. Other panelist at the session were Malini Mehra, founder and CEO of Centre for Social Markets,...Read More..

The full dataset from the SQUAT Survey is now available here! You will find the questionnaires and documentation files, also accessible at the same link as above, helpful if you decide to use the data. We invite you all to play around with the data and do...Read More..

NDTV’s award winning journalist, Sreenivasan Jain, on his much acclaimed programme Truth versus Hype, discussed the truth and the hype of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. You can see the video here. Nikhil took Sreenivasan Jain around villages of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous...Read More..

Diane and I are in New England for some presentations and meetings  While we were close to the Hebron town hall, we took the chance to turn in our absentee ballots for the fall elections.  Naturally, this prompted me to...Read More..

Sagarika Ghosh’s Times of India blog post this week echoes some of r.i.c.e.’s research findings and addresses a very deep reason why India’s sanitation challenge continues to be so intractable: purity, pollution, and caste discrimination.  You can read the full...Read More..

Written by Payal Hathi on October 22nd, 2014 In Rohini Nilekani’s recent LiveMint piece, she argues that before we “rush out to build toilets everywhere” it is important to understand both the costs of poor sanitation, and the complexities in overcoming the challenge....Read More..

Rukmini S. of The Hindu published an article today about Aashish’s new studyon how so few violent crimes against women are actually reported to the police in India.  Part of the article is below, but read the full text here. Husbands commit...Read More..

As Sangita posted a few days back, we had a great week at the UNC Health and Water Conference last week.  I’m posting our presentations and posters here, in case anyone wants to take a closer look at the research...Read More..