Research

Solid fuel use is an important contributor to air pollution and disease burden in India. We present survey evidence documenting LPG ownership and cooking fuel use in rural north India. LPG ownership has increased rapidly, substantially driven by the Ujjwala...Read More..

This paper argues that while the results of the WASH Benefits trials are important for understanding sanitation intervention and similar programmes, they do not imply that child health would not be improved by a large transition from open defecation to latrine...Read More..

This article draws upon 156 qualitative interviews conducted with the village and block-level officials in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, as well as on new quantitative survey data, to answer these questions. It finds that local officials used...Read More..

Manual scavenging is caste-based work which has been handed down over generations, subjecting the same families and communities to deep humiliation, social exclusion, and poor health. This book chapter argues that same casteist attitudes that relegate Dalits to the filthy work...Read More..

This book chapter discusses why rural Indians tend to reject affordable sanitation options, using which many poorer countries in the developing world have either completely eliminated or have successfully reduced open defecation. The practice of open defecation has negative externalities...Read More..

This paper assesses evidence for the hypothesis that facility births reduce NNM using new data from the National Family Health Survey, 2015-2016. It finds that for babies born outside of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, facility birth is robustly associated with neonatal...Read More..

This paper investigates disparities in child height — an important marker of population-level health — among population groups in rural India.  India is an informative context in which to study processes of health disparities because there is wide heterogeneity in...Read More..

The paper reports on two surveys. The first survey visited rural Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh in late 2018. It collected data on 9,812 people and interviewed 156 local government officials. The second survey, in Udaipur district, visited...Read More..

Through the use of new survey data, the experiences and perceptions of discrimination among Dalits and Muslims have been quantified. One important result is that many respondents report experiencing discrimination at school and in interactions with government officials. These results...Read More..

An analysis of child height-for-age using the newly released data from the National Family Health Survey-4 indicates that the average child height increased by about four-tenths of a height-for-age standard deviation between 2005 and 2015. Although important, this increase is...Read More..

Under review....Read More..

Intermarriage between races or castes is often used as a measure of average, population-level social tolerance.  It is commonly assumed that increases in education will make a society more tolerant.  General Social Survey (GSS) data between 1990 and 2016 show...Read More..

Exposure to air pollution has important consequences for public health. In January 2017, we visited Reusa, a block in Uttar Pradesh, to investigate pollution-generating activities and the policies that aim to mitigate them in rural areas. We found many sources of...Read More..

The Government of India’s NFHS-4 offers the best new data on open defecation in rural India to be released in over a decade. Although open defecation has become less common than it was ten years ago, it is still highly...Read More..

This paper uses data from the newly done phone survey by r.i.c.e. called Social Attitudes Research, India (SARI). It studies explicit prejudice against women and Dalits in Delhi, Mumbai, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. We find high levels of explicit prejudice...Read More..

Studies from the United States document important racial gaps in health. In developing societies, research on social disadvantage and health is more limited. Mental health, in particular, is poorly understood relative to its disease burden. Our study contributes the first...Read More..