Blog

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..

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..