New Delhi, India
Background
New Delhi will undertake the Global Early Adolescent Study in the urban slum of Sender Nagri and Nand Nagri with a population of over half a million residents. Most residents are rural migrants.
A busy street in Delhi, India. © 2012 Samita Mehta, Courtesy of Photoshare
Research Team
Our collaborating partner in India is the Population Council.
Rajib Acharya, Primary Investigator
Rajib Acharya, Associate I at the Council's India office, is a well-known statistician-demographer with more than 13 years of experience in academic research, and planning, designing, managing, and monitoring large studies, as well as in communicating results to policy makers. He has wide expertise in the design of large sample surveys, sample size determination, processing and managing large scale cross-sectional and longitudinal data sets and analysis of survey data on population, health and nutrition. He has made significant research contributions in the areas of adolescent health and development, including in relation to better understanding the situation of adolescents in vulnerable settings, and in the area of preventing unsafe abortion. Acharya worked extensively with Macro International on sample selection, instrument development, survey implementation, data management and analysis of the National Family Health Survey -2 (1998-99) (the Indian version of DHS) conducted in 26 states covering more than 100,000 households. He undertook the major responsibility for the design and implementation of two major and unique studies: a 4-year follow-up study of NFHS-2 respondents in 4 states of India (including Bihar and Jharkhand), covering about 11,000 households, and the sub-national Youth in India: Situation and Needs study conducted in 6 states of India, and covering almost 51,000 youth. In all these studies, he was entirely responsible for developing complex sample designs, including sample size determination, data management, post-survey processing of data including developing sample weights, and conducting multivariate analysis of data. He has considerable experience in conducting evaluation studies, including of interventions that focused on empowering adolescent girls, and increasing access to comprehensive abortion services; and in using advanced statistical techniques to measure impact. He has authored several journal articles, book chapters and scientific reports; and serves as reviewer of several international journals. Dr. Acharya will be the site-PI for the implementation of the GEAS in India. Contact Dr. Acharya.
Sharmistha Basu, Field Coordinator
Sharmistha Basu, PhD, is a social demographer with more than 10 years of work experience on a wide range of issues including adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights, maternal health, family planning, gender, population and development. She currently is serving as Program Officer, in the Poverty, Gender and Youth Programme. Prior to joining Population Council she was serving as Senior Technical Specialist (Research) in PROGRESS, (India Country Office) for FHI 360, Delhi, where she was responsible for providing technical and managerial support to programmatic/operations research around family planning. She also worked with International Centre for Research on Women, Delhi where she conducted research on reproductive health and child marriage norms in Bihar and Rajasthan. She has undertaken various consultancies on reproductive health research and gender issues and has extensive experience in undertaking qualitative research.
She has a good understanding of adolescent sexual and reproductive health/rights and family planning issues in India. She is deeply committed to development issues and in interested in undertaking and managing research activity in low resource countries. She can speak fluent English, Hindi, and Bengali. She will serve as a qualitative researcher/co-PI in the Global Early Adolescent Study.