By John Lowry John Lowry is a TCi intern and undergraduate senior studying biology and government. Alongside the other interns at ICRISAT, he studies individual and household dietary diversity with a special focus on the consumption of packaged foods and foods prepared outside of the home. Below, John reflects on how junk food has made…

We are pleased to announce two newcomers to the Tata-Cornell Institute. Ms. Megan Witwer joins the TCI staff as a Research Support Specialist and Dr. Mathew Abraham has come on board as a TCI Fellow. Welcome to TCI!

Maureen Valentine is a TCi Scholar and a second year Ph.D student in the department of Animal Science. For her research, she plans to focus on the widespread deficit of biomass for animal consumption in India. Comments in this blog are Maureen’s perspective as an non-Indian animal scientist considering animal health and welfare in the…

Focus group discussions (FGD) serve as a useful research methodology to gather qualitative data on a specific topic of interest.  As the intern team working on the MNDA with ICRISAT, we are particularly interested in understanding how eating out behavior and packaged food consumption influence dietary diversity at the individual and household level. Over the…

After working in the tribal villages of Ronhe and Gopla in the Khunti district, we are now in a new district called Koderma. Koderma is in the north of Jharkhand, bordering the state of Bihar. We are continuing our work to determine the impact of AguaClara’s water purification system based on economic and health indicators. In Koderma, we…

I was cornered. The lady we were surveying held out a glass of water in one hand, as she held her child in the other. “Thank you, but I’ve had enough to drink,” I said smiling. I did not want to be impolite, so how else do you express gratitude universally? Smile. Apparently she took…

Few things made me happier this week than walking into a home and seeing hugs and hearing welcomes between old friends. This week in Dokur, a rural village that ICRISAT has been working with since 1975, I got to see that just about four times a day. Dora and I said goodbye to our other team…

Over the past one and a half weeks since our arrival in India, our team has been hard at work developing and fine-tuning our survey instruments. Building on the MNDA pilot completed by TCi interns last year, our team aims to expand the information collected about dietary diversity at the individual and household level and also gather…

One of the major constraints to dairy production in India, particularly in resource-poor, rural areas, is a lack of feed and fodder for livestock. Birthal and Jha (2005) estimate that feed scarcity is the most important constraint in the dairy industry, and accounts for nearly half of all losses in Indian dairy production. An expected deficit of…

I am working in the rural villages of Jharkhand as a TCi Intern this summer. Paired with TCi PhD Scholar Shiuli Vanaja, we will be looking at the economic and health impacts of the AguaClara water treatment technology. AguaClara is an engineering firm started by several Cornell alumni, and is supported by TCi. The technology is gravity powered and…