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
- Articles
What constrained the expansion of education in British India?
Education and human capital development were neglected in colonial India. This column explores how colonial policies interacted with local conditions to influence the trajectory of Indian education. ...
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Latika Chaudhary
- 22 July, 2013
- Articles
Micro-innovations in education
The poor quality of school teachers is widely acknowledged as a major obstacle to the educational success of children from low income families. STIR Education visited and spoke to over 3,000 teacher...
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Sharath Jeevan James Townsend
- 17 July, 2013
- Notes from the Field
Vocational education: A means to an end?
Youth underemployment, especially among less educated populations perpetuates poverty. Despite the importance of youth unemployment, there is little knowledge on how to create smooth school-to-work tr...
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Pushkar Maitra Subha Mani
- 15 July, 2013
- Articles
Cycling to School: Increasing High School Enrolment for Girls in Bihar
This project studies the impact of an innovative Programme in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrolment by providing girls who continued to secondary ...
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Karthik Muralidharan Nishith Prakash
- 01 June, 2013
- IGC Research on India
Tuberculosis control in India: More bang for bucks than simply saving lives
India has one of the world’s worst records on tuberculosis. This column presents recommendations for how to fight it more cost effectively.
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Ramanan Laxminarayan Arindam Nandi
- 27 May, 2013
- Articles
Educating India: Choice, autonomy and learning outcomes
The Indian education system does not effectively promote the prior right of parents to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children. This column argues that the degree of freedo...
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Parth J. Shah
- 22 May, 2013
- Articles
The invisible and urgent challenge of learning
While almost all six to fourteen year olds in India are enrolled in school, their performance is far below expected levels. The common view is that the problem can be addressed by filling gaps in the...
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Rukmini Banerji
- 20 May, 2013
- Articles
Distance and institutional deliveries in rural India
India has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the world. A major cause is that a significant proportion of women continue to deliver babies at home without the presence of a skilled attendant. This...
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Emily Dansereau Santosh Kumar Christopher Murray
- 19 April, 2013
- Articles
India's disputed ruling on pharmaceuticals and patents
On April 1 2013, the Supreme Court of India rejected the attempt by Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, to patent a new version of the leukemia drug Glivec. The verdict follows previous rulin...
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Arvind Subramanian
- 10 April, 2013
- Perspectives
Using evidence for better policy: The case of primary education in India
While India has achieved considerable success in increasing primary school enrolment and improving input-based measures of school quality over the past 10 years, learning outcomes continue to be abysm...
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Karthik Muralidharan
- 18 March, 2013
- Articles
Reducing poisoning by arsenic in tubewell water
Millions of tubewells across the Indo-Gangetic plain supply drinking water that is relatively free of microbial contaminants. However, many of these tubewells tap groundwater that is high in arsenic a...
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Alexander van Geen Chander Kumar Singh
- 11 March, 2013
- Articles
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
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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...
- Saswata Ghosh
- 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