31 May, 2019Right to Education Act: Trends in enrolment, test scores, and school quality
A decade ago, India joined a range of countries that mandate free, compulsory education for school-aged children. Passed in August 2009, India’s Right to Education Act was potentially transformative...
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Manisha Shah 
12 July, 2019
- Articles
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...
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Kanika Mahajan Sheetal Sekhri
- 01 October, 2019
- 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...
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Diane Coffey Dean Spears
- 02 October, 2019
- Perspectives
Achieving universal health coverage in India: Inefficiency is the problem, not money
India has been widely criticised for having one of the world’s lowest public spending on health. In this article, Kanchan Mukherjee contends that even with this minimal expenditure it is possible to...
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Kanchan Mukherjee
- 19 December, 2017
- Perspectives
Improving nutritional outcomes through conditional cash transfers
The Indian government plans to universalise the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana – a conditional cash transfer programme for pregnant women and lactating mothers that aims to improve maternal and...
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Alok Kumar Sneha Palit
- 22 November, 2017
- Articles
Engaging the community to make schools accountable for delivering quality education
While the dismal quality of primary education in India has received considerable attention at the state and national levels, rural communities still seem to associate school quality with parameters su...
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K. Vaijayanti
- 21 November, 2017
- Notes
Malnutrition and the National Food Security Act
The National Food Security Act aims to remove hunger and reduce malnutrition by providing subsidised foodgrains to two-thirds of the population. Using nationally representative data, this column finds...
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Anders Kjelsrud Rohini Somanathan
- 31 October, 2017
- Articles
Barriers in accessing applications under RTE quota in Gujarat
In the school year 2017-18, Gujarat shifted from a paper-based system at the district level to an online system at the state level, for applications under the Right to Education Act. In this note, res...
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Ambrish Dongre Ishu Gupta Ankur Sarin Karan Singhal Nisha Vernekar
- 30 October, 2017
- Notes
Recognition of snakebite as a neglected tropical disease: What does it mean for India?
In June this year, the WHO placed snakebite envenoming on its list of top-20 priority neglected tropical diseases. In this article, Dr Bharati contends that India, which has the highest burden of snak...
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Kaushik Bharati
- 10 October, 2017
- Perspectives
A letter to Oxfam: Reframing the questions around private-sector healthcare
A 2009 Oxfam paper puts forth the view that scaling-up private healthcare provision is very unlikely to deliver high-quality care to the poor. Commenting on the paper, Jishnu Das contends that while i...
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Jishnu Das
- 29 September, 2017
- Perspectives
Japanese encephalitis in Gorakhpur: Why has vaccination failed to make an impact?
Vaccination is the mainstay of prevention strategies for Japanese encephalitis – the child killer disease that recently caused many deaths in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. In this article, Dr Kaushik B...
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Kaushik Bharati
- 18 September, 2017
- Perspectives
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...
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Bhaskar Pant
- 06 September, 2017
- Perspectives
Can India reap the demographic dividend in higher education?
India’s population is going through a ‘demographic bulge’, with an increase in the proportion of the working age group and a decrease in that of dependents. In this article, Shivakumar Jolad com...
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Shivakumar Jolad
- 05 September, 2017
- Perspectives
Gorakhpur's Japanese Encephalitis malady
The recent controversy around multiple child deaths in a public hospital in Gorakhpur district in Uttar Pradesh has brought the focus back on Japanese Encephalitis – the child killer disease. In thi...
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Smriti Mudgal Sharma
- 24 August, 2017
- Perspectives
Health policy and economic growth in India
A new synthesis paper (Menon 2017) produced by the International Growth Centre brings together evidence from various health-related IGC studies on India undertaken over the past seven years, to draw i...
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Nalini Gulati Nidhiya Menon
- 27 July, 2017
- Perspectives
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost 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...
- Abhijeet Singh
- 14 April, 2014
- Articles
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
A quiet revolution: The case of primary education in Uttar Pradesh
The challenge in India’s school education system today is how to translate years of schooling into learning. While there is reason to lament the learning crisis, a quiet movement is taking place in ...
- Shobhini Mukerji
- 31 May, 2019
- Notes