See also: Anniversary of the New Delhi Attack Reminds Us that Tackling Violence is Urgent December 16, 2012 will in the foreseeable future be remembered as the day in which six men savagely gang…

Happy belated 1st World Toilet Day! The newly designated UN day embodies the enormous development challenge of providing safe toilets to all. More than 2.5 billion people still don’t have access…

“They say this land will change next year”, Kallo said. We were standing on the edge of her barren land, just after a late monsoon down poor. Even when wet, I could see the land was useless, it…

Why Sanitation Access Doesn’t Work Unless the Entire Village Buys In Jitender is a four-year old boy with forward-thinking parents. Although it’s common in his village, in the Indian state of…

I went to bed early that night in Rudrprayag. The trip had worn me out and we were not even halfway up the Alaknanda Valley. Still, sleep would not come. The air conditioning made too much noise.…

For centuries, cities have been the beacon for economic prosperity. Drawn by the promise of economic, social and political opportunity, more than half the world’s population live in cities today.…

I have been visiting coastal Odisha for the past four years, earlier when we were preparing the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project (NCRMP) and subsequently during project implementation.  …

South Asia is the least integrated region in the world. Intra-regional trade in South Asia is less than 2% of GDP compared to over 20% in East Asia. Labor mobility and regional travel is minimal,…

A forthcoming book (The Shame of it: Global Perspectives on Anti-poverty Policy, Gubrium E. K., Pellissery S. and Lodemel I., Policy Press, 2013), the first of a series reporting on a stream of…

Losses due to disasters to human and physical capital are on the rise across the world.  Over the past 30 years, total losses have tripled, amounting to $3.5 trillion. While the majority of these…