Research

Since October 2014, the Government of India has worked towards the goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019 through the Swachh Bharat Mission. In June 2014, the results of a survey of rural sanitation behaviour in North India were first...Read More..

In light of India’s continuing efforts to reduce maternal mortality and make childbirth safer for women, this article explores why government hospitals continue to be dangerously unhygienic, posing serious risk of infection to patients in maternity wards and labor rooms. ...Read More..

Survey evidence from rural North India showing persistent solid fuel use despite increases in liquefied petroleum gas ownership is presented. Although three-quarters of survey households in these states had LPG, almost all also had a stove that uses solid fuels....Read More..

Objective: We assess the feasibility of measuring awareness and use of medical abortion via a mobile phone survey on social attitudes in India. Study design: In 2018, we conducted a mobile phone survey with 3455 married men and women in...Read More..

Objectives: To investigate differences in reported open defecation between a question about latrine use or open defecation for every household member and a household-level question. Setting: Rural India is home to most of the world’s open defecation. India’s Demographic and...Read More..

Chronic respiratory conditions are a leading cause of death in the world. Using data on lung obstruction from the WHO Survey of Global AGEing and Adult Health (WHO-SAGE 2007-08), this paper studies the determinants of respiratory health in India, home...Read More..

This paper by Dean and Sangita (co-authored with Sagnik Dey, Sourangshu Choundary, Noah Scovronick and Joshua Apte) is the first study to directly estimate the impact of early-life exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) on child height-for-age at the...Read More..

This paper investigates the child health impacts associated with a large coal plant expansion in India. Using place and cohort fixed effects, exposure to a median-sized coal plant at birth is associated with a height deficit of 0.09-0.10 standard deviations....Read More..

This paper studies people’s willingness to sacrifice to achieve climate mitigation using a new-survey experiment that is representative of adults in the Indian state of Rajasthan and the city of Mumbai. In contrast to developed countries, few studies investigate climate...Read More..

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..