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Human Development

Designing India’s national healthcare protection: Challenges and opportunities

  • Perspectives

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...

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National Nutrition Mission: Will it harmonise with India’s health and nutrition agenda?

India is home to 31% of all stunted children and half of all wasted children across the globe. Lately it took a major step in the direction of holistically addressing the mammoth multidimensional prob...

  • Perspectives

India’s education quandary: Learning from learning outcomes

The World Bank’s Human Capital Index, 2018 ranks India at 115 out of 157 nations. While there has been progress towards universalisation of elementary education and gains in broad indicators such as...

  • Perspectives
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School consolidation in Himachal Pradesh: Achieving quality and inclusion

While the emphasis on neighbourhood schooling in India’s education policy over the past 15 years has increased enrolment, it has also contributed to a proliferation of poor quality, small schools. T...

  • Perspectives

Peer influence and human capital accumulation: Evidence from Delhi University colleges

College is an important milestone in life that is believed to develop several aspects of an individual's human capital, broadly defined to include both cognitive and socio-emotional traits. Consequen...

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Understaffed, underserved: Human problems of India's public health system

India’s progress in reducing infant and maternal mortality is rather slow. This column shows the extent of shortfall of gynaecologists and auxiliary nurse midwives - the frontline of the battle agai...

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Whither female disadvantage? An analysis of private school enrolment in India

Given the poor condition of government schools and the perceived efficiency of private schools, Indian parents are increasingly choosing to send their children to private schools. This column examines...

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Using geospatial methods in estimating exposure to open defecation

Eliminating open defecation is an important policy priority in India. In this article, Arya, George and Singh from the Centre for Policy Research, illustrate how using readily available geospatial dat...

  • Perspectives

Water quality awareness and behaviour change

Universal access to clean water is far from a reality in many developing countries. This column examines a nationwide information campaign that attempted to minimise the use of arsenic-contaminated tu...

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Maternity entitlements for healthier babies

The National Food Security Act, 2013 provides for a maternity benefit of not less than Rs. 6,000 for every pregnant and lactating mother in India. In this article, Coffey and Hathi explain why materni...

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The growing problem of excess weight in India

The Indian population is increasingly becoming overweight or obese, and this phenomenon is likely to impose a considerable health burden in the future. Analysing data from the Indian Human Development...

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Ensuring access to medicines through PPPs

To address the issue of low access to basic medicines by the general public, the state government of West Bengal introduced Fair Price Medicine Shops in secondary and tertiary hospitals through a Publ...

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India's informal doctors: Assets, not crooks

Informal healthcare providers are the most common, and sometimes the only source of healthcare, in much of rural India. In this article, Jishnu Das of the World Bank argues that informal providers sho...

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What are schools worth?

Since large-scale expansions in education impact both individual behaviours and labour markets, convincing causal estimates of their overall benefits are hard to generate. Analysing the overall econom...

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Early life nutrition and future educational outcomes: Findings from ICDS

Integrated Child Development Services – India’s flagship child nutrition programme – has recently suffered a major cut in funding. This column shows that supplementary nutrition provided under t...

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Maulik Jagnani

Cornell University

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Aditya Dasgupta

University of California, Merced

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Sandip Sukhtankar

University of Virginia

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Karthik Muralidharan

University of California, San Diego

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Paul Niehaus

University of California, San Diego

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Diane Coffey

University of Texas

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Payal Hathi

University of California, Berkeley

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research institute for compassionate economics

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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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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.

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Reservation under RTE: Status of implementation and way forward

Section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act, 2009, mandates that non-minority private unaided schools should reserve at least 25% of seats in entry-level grades for children from economically weak...

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