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Tag Search: “water & sanitation”

15th Finance Commission: Covid-19 warrants rethink of local government allocations

The 15th Finance Commission has made significant departures from the previous Central Finance Commissions in its recommendations for urban local governments, in its interim report for 2020-21. In this...

  • Perspectives

Gender composition of children and sanitation behaviour

Open defecation has been linked to various public health issues and has gained significant policy attention. Nonetheless, research has shown that due to son preference, households in India underinvest...

  • Articles

What the Swachh Bharat Mission did not change

On the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and 5th anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), Coffey and Spears discuss findings from a field survey about changes in open defecation in rura...

  • Perspectives

Access to toilets and public safety of women

Launched on 2 October 2014, Swachh Bharat Mission aimed to increase the proportion of rural households with access to a toilet from 38.8% to 100% by 2019. In the run-up to Gandhi Jayanti and the 5th a...

  • Articles

Rural sanitation: A charter of demands

A government survey shows that 93% of rural households in India have access to a toilet and 96% of those having a toilet use them. However, critics point out contradictions between these data and micr...

  • Notes from the Field

Labelled loans and sanitation investments

Rural Indian households report lack of affordability as the main reason for not having a toilet. This article investigates – through an experiment in rural Maharashtra – whether microcredit labelled f...

  • Articles

Gender, electoral competition, and sanitation in India

The negative impact of poor sanitation is more pronounced for women than men and therefore, women have a stronger desire to improve sanitation. Analysing district-level data from 15 major Indian state...

  • Articles

Groundwater depletion in India: Social losses from costly well deepening

There is widespread concern about groundwater over-extraction in India and, in turn, the long-term sustainability of irrigated agriculture. Since groundwater is a common pool resource, its overuse imp...

  • Articles

Why we still need to measure open defecation in rural India

On October 2, the government will host the UN Secretary General and other international delegates at the Mahatma Gandhi International Sanitation Convention, to celebrate India’s progress on ending ope...

  • Perspectives

How sanitation facilities in schools can improve educational outcomes

The Indian government launched the School Sanitation and Hygiene Education programme in 1999 to build latrines in schools. Analysing data from nearly 140,000 schools in 2003 - some of which received a...

  • Articles

Understanding Slum Formation and Designing an Urban Housing Policy for Poor in Bihar

This project identifies the spatial pattern of the urban poor living in slums of four districts of Bihar. It also identified direct and indirect determinants of their settlement locations and understa...

  • IGC Research on India

Making India open-defecation free by 2019

Swachh Bharat Mission – the flagship sanitation programme of the Indian government – aims to make India open-defecation free by 2019. However, this has only been achieved in 17 of 686 districts so far...

  • Perspectives