15 April, 2020India’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...
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Sugata Ghosh Sarmistha Pal 
16 April, 2020
- 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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Deepak Saraswat
- 22 April, 2020
- Articles
How India can lead the world to build a functioning public health system
The world has not yet invested in a cadre of trustworthy, community-embedded public health workers who are empowered to undertake their tasks as professionals, despite the lessons from Ebola virus dis...
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Stuti Khemani
- 20 May, 2020
- 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
Why doesn’t anybody know if Swachh Bharat Mission is succeeding?
In 2014, the Prime Minister announced a goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019. In this article, Coffey and Spears, contend that now almost two-thirds of the way through the Swachh Bharat Mission...
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Diane Coffey Dean Spears
- 10 July, 2017
- Perspectives
Language and development
Language choice is central to organisation of society, transmission of knowledge, and interpersonal communication, and hence, has implications for socioeconomic inequality. This column examines the co...
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David D. Laitin Rajesh Ramachandran
- 05 July, 2017
- Articles
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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
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...
- Saswata Ghosh
- 27 March, 2019
- 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