Isha Ray

• PhD (Stanford University)
• Professor at University of California, Berkeley

Social norms on household energy consumption practices have been historically fostered through ideas of comfort, cleanliness and modernity, underpinned by reliable and affordable energy services. Contemporary discourses on energy transitions require households to conform to new expectations of “sustainable” living, calling for energy users to parti...

Despite some progress, universal access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) by 2030—a remit of Sustainable Development Goal 6—remains a distant prospect in many countries. Policy-makers and implementers of the WASH sector are challenged to track a new path. This research aimed to identify core orienting themes of the sector, as legacies of...

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions significantly reduce health risks in low- and middle-income countries. Many rely on women, but the extent of women’s engagement remains undocumented. Here we conducted a re-review of papers from two systematic reviews that assessed the effectiveness of water, sanitation and/or handwashing with soap...

Climate change intensifies longstanding tensions over groundwater sustainability and equity of access among users. Though private land ownership is a primary mechanism for accessing groundwater in many regions, few studies have systematically examined the extent to which farmland markets transform groundwater access patterns over time. This study b...

Review of: Jaffee, D. (2023). Unbottled: The fight against plastic water and for water justice. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions significantly reduce health risks in low- and middle-income countries. Many rely on women for their success but the extent of women’s engagement remains unclear. We conducted a re-review of papers from two systematic reviews that assessed effectiveness of water, sanitation, and/or handwashing with soap i...

The unaffordability of clean cookstoves and fuels, as defined by the World Health Organization, is one of the most significant reasons for the persistent use of unclean fuels, even when "stacked" alongside a clean stove. To see health benefits, the entire cooking stack must be clean, and therefore the clean stack needs to be affordable. Using a cas...

Though safe drinking water for all is a global public health goal, disparities in access persist worldwide. We present a critical review of primary‐data based environmental justice (EJ) studies on drinking water. We examine their findings in relation to the broader EJ and drinking water literatures. Using pre‐specified protocols to screen 2423 reco...

Despite dramatic reductions in global risk exposures to unsafe water sources, lack of access to clean water remains a persistent problem in many rural and last-mile communities. A great deal is known about demand for household water treatment systems; however, similar evidence for fully treated water products is limited. This study evaluates an NGO...

Drinking water treatment technologies are largely evaluated based on metrics such as contaminant removal efficiency, capital costs, and health impacts. However, the potential for safe water technologies to lead to positive health outcomes depends greatly on user satisfaction, consistent and sustained operation, and financial viability. In this pers...

March 22 is World Water Day, reminding us that safe and affordable drinking water for all is essential for human health and is a human right. Safe drinking water access prevents numerous infectious diseases and exposure to harmful chemicals, whereas ineffective access can com promise public health efforts, including the quality of healthcare servic...

Background: Centralized chlorination of urban piped water supplies has historically contributed to major reductions in waterborne illness. In locations without effective centralized water treatment, point-of-use (POU) chlorination for households is widely promoted to improve drinking water quality and health. Realizing these health benefits requir...

In 2010, resolution 64/292 of the UN General Assembly formally recognized the human right to water and sanitation, proclaiming that the right to clean drinking water and sanitation is essential to the realization of all other human rights. The recognition that a service sector delivers a human right takes the justification for universal access to c...

Reliable access to safe sanitation is a cornerstone of human health and gender equality. Over the last 10 years, the risks of sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH) associated with inadequate access to household latrines have received considerable attention. This is especially true of studies on seeking sanitation under cover of darkness. Her...

Over 2 billion people globally lack access to safely managed drinking water. In contrast to the household-level, manually implemented treatment products that have been the dominant strategy for gaining low-cost access to safe drinking water, passive chlorination technologies have the potential to treat water and reduce reliance on individual behavi...

Although it was reported in 2012 that 89% of the world’s population had access to piped water, it is estimated that at least one billion people receive this water for fewer than 24 h per day. Intermittency places a variety of burdens upon households, including inadequate quantities of supply at the household level, unpredictability of water utiliti...

Access to safe drinking water is considered a universal human right. In the U.S., exposure to arsenic contamination in drinking water disproportionately impacts small, groundwater-reliant communities and communities of color. These inequities are driven by a combination of natural, built, and sociopolitical factors. The United Nations calls upon st...

The large and multidisciplinary literature on water for domestic use and gender has two primary foci: (1) the negative health and well-being impacts of inadequate access to safe water, and (2) the effects of women’s participation in water allocation and management decisions. These foci are reflected in both the research and policy literatures. Smal...

Small, low-income communities in the United States disproportionately lack access to safe drinking water (i.e. water that meets regulated quality standards). At a community level, the literature has broadly claimed that a major barrier to safe drinking water access is low technical, managerial, and financial capacity. At a broader structural level,...

Small, low-income communities in the United States disproportionately lack access to safe drinking water (i.e. water that meets regulated quality standards). At a community level, the literature has broadly claimed that a major barrier to safe drinking water access is low technical, managerial, and financial (TMF) capacity. At a broader structural...

Bottled water is a rapidly growing yet relatively understudied source of drinking water globally. In addition to concerns about the safety of bottled water, the adverse environmental health and social impacts associated with bottled water production, distribution, consumption, and reliance are considerable. Our objective was to comprehensively revi...

The human right to water (HRTW) and sustainable development goals (SDG) emphasize that human well‐being depends not just on the quality and physical accessibility of drinking water, but also on its economic accessibility. Despite this recognition, governments and academics alike have been hard‐pressed to define and measure water affordability. In t...

The local public goods and distributive politics literatures focus overwhelmingly on government spending and service access. Yet service quality can vary dramatically and be targeted strategically. We provide one of the first analyses of a key dimension of service quality: intermittency, which affects vital services like water and electricity for h...

2.9 billion people lack access to clean cooking fuels and technologies. This review analyzes the literature on affordability as a barrier to adoption and consistent use of clean cooking stoves and fuels. We find diverse frameworks, definitions and metrics in use, and frequent discussions on stove price, fuel costs, microfinance, and smaller procure...

The ubiquitous use of artworks (e.g., paintings, music, films) in environmental activism has been shown to trigger specific cognitive processes as well as changes in personal values and behaviours. There is less understanding of whether (or how) gender-differentiated environmental claims and gender-transformative initiatives are voiced and promoted...

Safely managed waste reuse may be a sustainable way to protect human health and livelihoods in agrarian-based countries without adequate sewerage. The safe recovery and reuse of fecal sludge-derived fertilizer (FSF) has become an important policy discussion in low-income economies as a way to manage urban sanitation to benefit peri-urban agricultur...

Water affordability is central to water access but remains a challenge to measure. California enshrined the human right to safe and affordable water in 2012 but the question remains: how should water affordability be measured across the state? This paper contributes to this question in three steps. First, we identify key dimensions of water afforda...

The public health community has tried for decades to show, through evidence-based research, that safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and clean cooking fuels that reduce household air pollution are essential to safeguard health and save lives in low-income and middle-income countries. In the past 40 decades, there have been many innovations i...

From 2016-2019, the Indian Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) distributed over 80 million Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) stoves, making it the largest clean cooking program ever. Yet, evidence shows widespread continued use of the traditional chulha, negating the potential health benefits of LPG. Here we use semi-structured interviews with female...

Most urban residents in high-income countries obtain piped and treated water for drinking and domestic use from centralized utility-run water systems. In low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), however, utilities work alongside myriad other service providers that deliver water to hundreds of millions of city-dwellers. Hybrid modes of water deliver...

BACKGROUND: Inadequate access to safe drinking water remains a global health problem, particularly in rural areas. Boiling is the most commonly used form of point-of-use household water treatment (HWT) globally, although the use of bottled water in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) is increasing rapidly. OBJECTIVES: We assessed the regional...

Based on a study of microbial water quality in a small town (Alibag) in India, we show the practical limitations of monitoring for fecal indicator bacteria to meet SDG 6. We find that even when water quality monitoring and testing infrastructure is in place, low institutional capacity and the pressure to not ‘fail’ the expected water quality standa...

1. Low- and middle-income country utilities are often under pressure to meet state and national drinking water quality targets, even when they are under-resourced to meet these targets. 2. “Ranking” countries on the basis of the current SDG6 indicators may produce (indirect) pressure to inaccurately report water quality monitoring results. 3. Progr...

COVID-19 is a disease with no proven pharmaceutical intervention and no proven vaccine. In such circumstances, prevention is all we have. The role of handwashing in the prevention of communicable diseases has been known for over a century, yet it remains severely neglected as a public health investment, to be periodically re-discovered during pande...

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, India’s flagship sanitation intervention, set out to end open defecation by October 2019. While the program improved toilet coverage nationally, large regional disparities in construction and use remain. Our study used ethnographic methods to explore perspectives on open defecation and latrine use, and the socio-economic and...

Developing decision-relevant science for adaptation requires the identification of climatic parameters that are both actionable for practitioners as well as tractable for modelers. In many sectors, these decision-relevant climatic metrics and the approaches that enable their identification remain largely unknown. “Co-production” of science with sci...

“Modern energy for all,” an internationally supported initiative to connect populations to electricity services, is expected to help reduce poverty-induced vulnerabilities. It has become a primary strategy for meeting sustainable development goals, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. However, when electricity is supplied by a capacity-constrained gri...

Sanitation research focuses primarily on containing human waste and preventing disease; thus, it has traditionally been dominated by the fields of environmental engineering and public health. Over the past 20 years, however, the field has grown broader in scope and deeper in complexity, spanning diverse disciplinary perspectives. In this article, w...

Although access to piped drinking water continues to increase globally, information on the prevalence and clonal composition of coliforms found in piped water systems in low-resource settings remains limited. From June to July 2016, we examined Escherichia coli isolates in domestic water from the distribution system in Alibag, a small town in India...

India’s flagship program on sanitation and hygiene – the Swachh Bharat Mission – aims to eliminate open defecation and to manage urban waste for a ‘Clean India’. The emptying of toilet pits and the transport of waste are as critical as more toilets are for sustainable sanitation. In unsewered cities of the global South, these services are mainly pr...

Intermittent piped water supply is common throughout urban India, but continuous, fully pressurized supply (“24x7 water”) is the Government of India service norm. We compare eight wards with intermittent water supply and eight wards that were upgraded to continuous supply in a demonstration project in Hubli-Dharwad, Karnataka. We employed a matched...

India has made enormous progress in access to toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission. But who cleans these toilets and how to they live? This photo-essay tracks the path of waste from toilet pit to dump, making visible the labor that produces the sanitary city

These photo-essays make visible the labor that produces the sanitary city. They highlight the "back end" of sanitation, looking beyond the toilet alone.

Full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ccSbbr4iFyImEutKH8C6/full Development plans with insufficient knowledge about local realities, and that do not share technical or planning details with the target communities, bedevil development practice. This study used a form of participatory modelling in three fishing communities in Nicaragua to e...

Public access to full text: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1WyNr_,iVXJtlo Urban service provision falls somewhere on the continuum of lower-cost, lower-quality, unreliable and intermittent to higher-cost, higher-quality, reliable and continuous. Piped water services in India are generally in the former category, but efforts are underway in some ci...

In 2013, manual scavenging, or the cleaning of “dry” latrines with unprotected hands, was abolished in India. Yet, millions of dry latrines are still manually serviced by Dalit labour. The Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Mission has put little effort into the health and dignity of sanitation workers relative to its efforts on subsidizing and encoura...

The rapid growth of bottled water use in low- and middle-income countries, and its normalization as a daily source of drinking water, does not provide a pathway for universal access. Generous and sustained investment in centralized and community utilities remains the most viable means for achieving safe water access for all. OPEN-ACCESS LINK TO PA...

Development plans with insufficient knowledge about local realities, and that do not share technical or planning details with the target communities, bedevil development practice. We used a form of participatory modeling in three fishing communities in Nicaragua to enable fishers to explore their economy and the potential impacts of fishery-based d...

India’s National Urban Sanitation Plan highlights the importance of latrine use, and also of “safe and proper disposal” for a sanitary city. It recommends that cities work towards technological, financing and governance initiatives that would ensure safe fecal sludge and septage management. Official policy documents put out by the Government of Ind...

Many policies and programs based on informational interventions hinge upon the assumption that providing citizens with information can help improve the quality of public services, or help citizens cope with poor services. We present a causal framework that can be used to identify leaks and blockages in the information production and dissemination p...

Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on...

Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on...

Low adoption and compliance levels for household water treatment and safe storage (HWTS) technologies have made it challenging for these systems to achieve measurable health benefits in the developing world. User compliance remains an inconsistently defined and poorly understood feature of HWTS programs. In this article, we develop a comprehensive...

Final published paper link: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1WWNt,6yxD6jCC Sustainable Development Goal 7, with the light bulb and power button as its symbols, in effect promotes the universal right to basic electricity services. Access for all demands both affordability and cost-recovery, and utilities (and donors) increasingly require users to sh...

The 2015 earthquakes caused approximately 9,000 deaths, 23,000 injuries and the destruction of more than 600,000 family homes. ● We conducted a study in Dolakha District to assess the multidimensional impacts of the 2015 earthquakes on small farmer communities and households. ● We asked: (1) What were the impacts from the earthquakes to small farm...

Environmental disasters, such as hurricanes, landslides, and earthquakes, are pervasive and disproportionately affect rural and poor populations. The concept of resilience is typically used in disaster scenarios to describe how a community or person is able to “bounce back” from a disaster event. At the same time, resilience theory also contends th...

Decentralized technologies and city-based governance are being actively promoted for urban sanitation in low-income countries. At the same time, municipal agencies in developing countries have little technical or financial capacity for sanitation planning. This paper develops an approach to sanitation planning that leverages citizen engagement and...

It has been three years since, invoking the name of Mahatma Gandhi and declaring that India needed toilets over temples, Prime Minister Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission. Its overarching goal is to eliminate open defecation; building new latrines, increasing their use, and raising awareness are the cornerstones of this significant initiative....

Photo-essay for World Toilet Day (19 November) 2017 on the ”back-end” of the sanitation chain. Published: India Water Portal: http://www.indiawaterportal.org/articles/where-there-are-no-sewers-toilet-cleaners-lucknow The Wire: https://thewire.in/198241/where-there-are-no-sewers-the-toilet-cleaners-of-lucknow/

Shallow groundwater containing toxic concentrations of arsenic is the primary source of drinking water for millions of households in rural West Bengal, India. Often, this water also contains unpleasant levels of iron and non-negligible fecal contamination. Alternatives to shallow groundwater are increasingly available, including government-built de...

Summary ● The 2015 earthquakes caused approximately 9,000 deaths, 23,000 injuries and the destruction of more than 600,000 family homes. ● We conducted a study in Dolakha District to assess the multidimensional impacts of the 2015 earthquakes on small farmer communities and households. ● We asked: (1) What were the impacts from the earthquakes to s...

This essay, the first of several essays in SSRC's “Just Environments” series, examines gender equality through the lens of access to basic sanitation. Moving beyond what the United Nations and others have proposed, I argue that in-home toilets are inadequate because they fail to account for those without homes, or those who are not home all day. Ra...

Approximately two billion people drink unsafe water. Boiling is the most commonly used household water treatment (HWT) method globally and in China. HWT can make water safer, but sustained adoption is rare and bottled water consumption is growing. To successfully promote HWT, an understanding of associated socioeconomic factors is critical. We coll...

Significant development funding flows to informational interventions intended to improve public services. Such “transparency fixes” often depend on the cooperation of frontline workers who produce or disseminate information for citizens. This article examines frontline worker compliance with a transparency intervention in Bangalore’s water sector....

Measurements of household water consumption are extremely difficult in intermittent water supply (IWS) regimes in low- and middle-income countries, where water is delivered for short durations, taps are shared, metering is limited, and household storage infrastructure varies widely. Nonetheless, consumption estimates are necessary for utilities to...

Measurements of household water consumption are extremely difficult in intermittent water supply (IWS) regimes in low- and middle-income countries, where water is delivered for short durations, taps are shared, metering is limited, and household storage infrastructure varies widely. Nonetheless, consumption estimates are necessary for utilities to...

Can providing citizens with information compensate for unreliable public services? We present a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. The implementers expected that increasing service predictability would reduce coping costs, increase transp...

This paper develops an agenda for investing in sustainable development, with particular emphasis on local priorities, poverty alleviation and gender equality. Sustainable development can take many different pathways, even within the dominant ‘three-pillar’ paradigm (economy-environment-society) of sustainability. The paper thus argues that any sust...