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Human Development

Common tongue? How mother tongue instruction influences education

  • Perspectives

The State’s frontline workers: An overlooked human resource

The Covid-19 and the related lockdown have focused the nation's attention on two groups of people who number in millions but have still somehow not received adequate attention: the migrant informal wo...

  • Notes from the Field

India’s battle against Covid-19: A comparative perspective

It has been suggested that, India could selectively relax the lockdown that has been imposed on it, given its favourable demographic profile. In this post, Ghosh and Pal argue that having a younger po...

  • 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...

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Child health, fertility, and sex ratio: India vs. Bangladesh

Despite having lower per capita income, Bangladesh has superior performance over India on key welfare indicators. This article compares the experiences of India and Bangladesh on several key indicator...

  • Articles

The role of informal rural healthcare providers in universal health coverage

Millions of private informal healthcare providers provide essential doorstep health services to rural households in India. The law has not succeeded in reducing the informal healthcare market as there...

  • Notes from the Field

Providing information on school quality in a dysfunctional public education system

Insufficient school accountability and limited parental awareness of school quality can result in poor learning outcomes of students. This article reports the results of a randomised experiment in rur...

  • 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 o...

  • Perspectives

Kerala vaccination policy: Is it feasible for other states too?

In a drastic step to ensure that all children below five years of age are fully vaccinated, the Kerala government introduced a draft health policy in February 2018, which made vaccination compulsory f...

  • Perspectives

Income risks and schooling investment in rural Bihar

Income and earnings are highly volatile in developing countries as a majority of the population relies on agriculture or informal jobs for their livelihood. Based on a primary survey in rural Bihar, t...

  • Articles

National Health Stack: A job half well-done

To support the implementation of the recently launched National Health Protection Scheme, NITI Aayog has proposed the creation of digital infrastructure called National Health Stack. In this post, Smr...

  • Perspectives

How retail drug markets in poor countries develop

We need effective, affordable medicines to confront the alarming burden of infectious diseases in the developing world. However, many of the drugs for sale in developing countries are of poor quality....

  • Articles

Maternal health services utilisation: Has the rich-poor gap declined?

Various studies have noted that vast inequalities – economic and socio-demographic – exist in maternal, newborn, and child health outcomes and utilisation of care services. In this post, Sohini Pa...

  • Perspectives

Designing India’s national healthcare protection: Challenges and opportunities

The burden of non-communicable diseases, requiring costly hospital-based treatment, is increasing in India, and only 15% of the population has health insurance coverage. The Modi government recently i...

  • 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...

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Expected income support and child health

Government of India’s maternity support programme – Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana – seeks to provide income support to pregnant women and lactating mothers in rural India. Evaluating the p...

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Most Popular Human Development Posts

Giving up too early on malnourished children? Catch-up growth and Midday Meals

It is widely believed that malnourishment in the first few years of childhood adversely affects cognition and adult economic outcomes. This column presents new research which shows that full recovery...

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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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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.

  • Perspectives