Blogs

The building sector accounts for a significant share of energy consumption in India. Thus, policies that encourage energy efficiency in building construction have an important role to play in energy conservation. In this article, authors Sivaramakrishnan Balasubramanian and Gayathri Sivakumar … Read More

“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity”-Michael Porter Any study that evaluates a service/product innovation having a completely new or  modified design, not only assesses the effect of adoption by the community but also studies the process of adoption. … Read More

The Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission aims to make India “open-defecation free” by 2019. While it is a laudable goal, it is worth noting that a variety of government-driven sanitation programmes of the past, which included both subsidies and … Read More

Today, electronic data collection finds application in various walks of life – be it in hospitals, industries, or offices. Since the advent of Open Data Kit (ODK) and Survey CTO,among other software platforms, electronic data collection has drastically changed the … Read More

Previous studies on women’s role in agriculture and nutrition have indicated that women’s empowerment in agriculture is positively associated with per adult equivalent calorie availability and dietary diversity (Malapit 2013).  Research has also found that a woman’s decision-making autonomy has … Read More

In 2011, we launched a large-scale field experiment to evaluate a service (Avaaj Otalo, or AO) that delivers mobile-phone-based agricultural information to cotton farmers in western India. This service provides weekly agricultural advice in the form of voice calls to … Read More

Since the last post, I’ve had the opportunity to witness a couple of dialogues on the quantitative vs. qualitative debate; some were more encouraging than others. The first was during a panel session at the fall conference in Manila, where … Read More

Women’s empowerment is usually measured by several macro level indicators such as fertility rates, literacy rates, participation in the labor force, and involvement in political affairs. While the importance of these is undisputed, we believe there is also a lot … Read More

There is an increasing emphasis on improving learning outcomes in discussions on education policy in India. With encouraging improvement in enrollment rates in primary schools over the past decade, it seems only natural that the focus is shifting to school … Read More

For the past one year, GPS recordings have been important data points for all the phases of recent studies at IFMR-LEAD. This is because the relevance and application of GPS data has evolved enormously. Given its relevance in our work, … Read More