Blog

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..

IndiaSpend, the data journalism website, published an article by Payal. Here is the article. The full text of the article is also pasted below. – The Narendra Modi Government has announced that Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM) has to be a mass movement to make...Read More..

Written by Aashish Gupta on October 18th, 2014 Sanitation has dominated the r.i.c.e blog for sometime, but this paper on violence against women has been pending for an equally long time too. I finally revised it, and its online now. The paper,...Read More..

We just concluded a great week at the Water and Health Conference at UNC! Between the 4 of us attending, we had 6 verbal presentations and 6 poster presentations over the course of the week. We were so thrilled to...Read More..

The article, written by Rukmini S had the funny but tragic but true headline, Toilets on Paper. Here is the section which quotes Payal: The other thing that will change, the government says, is an emphasis on behavioural change. Over the last...Read More..

This is what he has to say! Had he a head for anything other than the trivial, Modi would not have been looking for film stars (and comprador Congressmen) as “brand ambassadors”, but summoning the hard working authors of the...Read More..

Atish Patel, while writing for the the Wall Street Journal’s India blog “India Real Time” just wrote an article covering rice research on sanitation. Here are some quotes from the article: The answer though, sanitation experts say, doesn’t lie only in building more...Read More..

The BBC just wrote an article featuring a lot of r.i.c.e. research. Check it outhere. Here are some quotes from the article: A staggering 70% of Indians living in villages – or some 550 million people – defecate in the open. Even...Read More..