12 March, 2025Pedalling towards gender equality and empowerment
In Bihar, India and in rural Zambia, the government introduced programmes to address gender gaps in education by providing adolescent girls with bicycles for their commute to school. Discussing the im...
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Vagisha Pandey Sahil Pawar Nishith Prakash 
07 March, 2025
- Articles
Does electrification illuminate women's lives?
A key reason for women’s low labour force participation in developing countries is the burden of unpaid domestic work. Analysing data from rural Bangladesh, this article assesses whether electrifica...
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Tanu Gupta Md. Tajuddin Khan Digvijay S. Negi
- 05 March, 2025
- Articles
The wide-ranging benefits of India’s Public Distribution System
India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) is the world’s largest food transfer programme and India’s most far-reaching social safety net, accounting for 60% of the country’s social assistance b...
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Kathy Baylis Ben Crost Aditya Shrinivas
- 17 February, 2025
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Gender Differences in Health Investments: Evidence from Health Care Providers in India
A central feature of many developing countries is the presence of significant gender differentials in health outcomes. One potential factor which can account for this is that females seek treatment la...
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Rajshri Jayaraman Debraj Ray Shing-Yi Wang
- 01 March, 2013
- IGC Research on India
Child stunting and open defecation: How much of the South Asian height
Children in India are shorter on average than children in Sub-Saharan Africa, even though Indians are richer on average. What explains this paradox? This column suggests open defecation as a possible ...
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Dean Spears
- 18 February, 2013
- Articles
Piloting a novel delivery mechanism of a critical public health service in India: arsenic testing of tubewell water in the field for a fee
The goal of this project was to determine the willingness of rural households in the state of Bihar, India, to have their tubewell tested for arsenic for a fee.
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Alexander van Geen Chander Kumar Singh
- 01 February, 2013
- IGC Research on India
Quantitative Baseline Assessment of Child Nutritional Status and Performance of ICDS Supplementary Nutrition Programme in Bihar
There are no easy solutions guaranteed to reduce leakage and increase the provision of nutritious food to Bihar’s millions of malnourished children and mothers. The quantitative assessment in this p...
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Ronald Abraham Andrew Fraker Neil Buddy Shah
- 15 December, 2012
- IGC Research on India
Improving Child Health and Schooling
This project collected information on whether the child received a health report card (and checkup), as well as attendance data for that child for each month of the school year. Combining this with in...
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Prabhat P. Ghosh Anjini Kochar
- 01 December, 2012
- IGC Research on India
The root of poverty: Ruinous healthcare costs
While natural disasters and political turmoil rightly grab our attention, this column shows that it is everyday events that drag most people into poverty. For many, the first of these is illness and t...
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Anirudh Krishna
- 26 October, 2012
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Multi-dimensional deprivation in India: Comparisons with China and Vietnam
While several studies have compared India with China on economic measures such as GDP per capita, this column looks at a measure of people’s deprivation across a wide range of indicators. It finds I...
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Ranjan Ray
- 22 October, 2012
- Articles
Child malnutrition in India and what can be done about it
While many things are getting better in India, the disturbing levels of child malnutrition are hardly changing. This column explores why and asks what can be done. It calls for more conditional cash t...
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Pushkar Maitra Anu Rammohan
- 15 October, 2012
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Why Indian education needs to get back to reality
What is the best advice to give an Indian education department official? This column argues that the best thing officials can do is drop the assumptions and stick to reality – otherwise many childre...
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Rukmini Banerji
- 12 October, 2012
- Articles
Child malnutrition: Why wealth isn't the only problem
Why does child malnutrition persist in India? This column argues that the reason is not limited to poverty or inadequate access to food; but that a lack of knowledge about healthy nutrition plays a vi...
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Nisha Malhotra
- 08 October, 2012
- Articles
How to keep more girls in school? Lessons from Bangladesh
For years developing countries have been trying to increase parents’ incentives to send their children, particularly girls, to school and keep them there. This column looks at the success of Banglad...
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Mushfiq Mobarak
- 24 September, 2012
- Articles
Education in Bihar: Still a long road ahead
In the north Indian state of Bihar, education has been improving faster than in the rest of the country. But as this column reminds us, Bihar is starting from the bottom. For education to continue to ...
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Nishith Prakash
- 07 September, 2012
- Articles
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Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials in India: District-level estimates from Census 2011
The 2011 Indian Census data show a higher growth rate of Muslim population compared to the Hindu population. This article provides an in-depth picture of Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials at the di...
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- 27 March, 2019
- Articles
Understanding India’s mental health crisis
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, several reports have indicated a worsening of mental health issues among individuals across age groups. In this post, Michele Mary Bernadine examines the stat...
- Michele Mary Bernadine
- 06 April, 2021
- Perspectives
Ten steps to transform the quality of education in India
In this article, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director of Educational Initiatives, suggests 10 initiatives that can help transform the quality of education in India.
- Sridhar Rajagopalan
- 19 November, 2015
- Perspectives