-The Hindu In his book on Bihar, M.R. Sharan provides a closely observed, scholarly, and empathetic account of the struggle to make constitutional promises a reality in rural India M.R. Sharan’s splendid book brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion. The scene is a public meeting at “Narega Chowk” in Ratnauli village, Muzaffarpur district of Bihar. Activists of Bihar Manrega Watch (BMW) are helping resolve grievances. An old woman...
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Why RCTs aren't the simple answer to solving India's learning crisis -Martin Haus and Rakesh K Rajak
-TheWire.in The problem with the domination of RCTs in development is the depreciation of other, more relevant findings using different methodologies. This year’s Nobel prize in economics has been awarded to the three researchers Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, who are well-known for their field experiments in the form of randomised controlled trials (RCTs). But can that methodology make meaningful contributions to solving the problem of our schools failing our...
More »Randomized control trials may not suit India's social schemes -Indira Rajaraman
-Livemint.com What works for a small-scale NGO-style intervention may not help the state’s implementation of it without elaborate checks The Nobel Prize for economics this year has gone to three scholars, two American citizens and one French-American. It has generated much excitement in India because one of the Americans, Abhijit Banerjee, is of Indian descent, and all three have worked on India. This has happened before. Angus Deaton, the 2015 recipient, and...
More »Vital additions to empirical research -Maitreesh Ghatak
-The Hindu Despite limitations, the use of randomised control trials has led to a paradigm shift in development policy evaluation If Rip Van Winkle was an academic economist and woke up from a two-decade long sleep this week, he would be baffled by the news of the Nobel Prize in Economics this year awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for pioneering the use of randomised control trials (RCTs) in...
More »Macro dimensions of poverty brushed aside -Pritam Singh
-The Tribune A serious methodological flaw of the RCT approach that has been pointed out by ethnographic studies of poverty is that its overemphasis on quantitative method has deprived it of the insights of qualitative methods. There is some recognition of the flaw by admitting that a mixed method approach can be useful, but the approach remains hostile to qualitative methods. THE award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics to Abhijit...
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