Submit Your Work
Economy
Governance
Thursday, July 23, 2020

Randomised Control Trials and the Alleviation of Poverty in India

This article is by
Sattva Vasavada
Sattva Vasavada
South Asia

Share this article
Download as PDF
Cite this Article

Article Contributor(s)

Sattva Vasavada

Article Title

Randomised Control Trials and the Alleviation of Poverty in India

Publisher

Global Views 360

Publication Date

July 23, 2020

URL

Poverty in India — A Representative Image

Poverty in India — A Representative Image | Source: Atul Kumar via Unsplash

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for their “experimental approach in alleviating global poverty”. Their experimental approach encompassed a variety of novel methods to understand and analyse interventions and Randomised Control Trials (RCTs). Their research has been used by policy makers to make informed policy decisions to best help the marginalised.

What are RCTs?

To understand the effect of a policy, intervention, or medicine, decision makers try to measure the efficacy of the treatment. Do deworming pills given to children improve test scores? Does providing chlorinated water improve the health and economic outcomes of villages? These are some causal (read causal, i.e. caused by, not casual) questions researchers are interested in. The best way to analyse causal effects is to randomise the selection of people in the treatment and the control group (for example: children who are given deworming pills versus children who are not given the pills). This random selection of the two groups removes many statistical biases that might affect the results.

RCTs in India:

Many of the RCTs performed by Banerjee and Duflo were in India. They involved short- and long-term impact assessments of various interventions, policies, models, and treatments. We look at a few RCTs implemented in India:

Teacher absenteeism rates:

Troubled by the low attendance rates (or high absence rates) of public-school teachers in India, Duflo assessed the impact of financial incentives on the absence rates of teachers in Rajasthan. The study monitored teacher attendance by cameras, which was tied to a financial incentive if the attendance was high. From a baseline absence rate of 44%, teacher absenteeism in the treatment group fell by 21%, relative to the control group. High teacher attendance caused child test scores to improve too.

COVID-19 and health-seeking behaviour:

In the context of COVID-19, Banerjee tested the effect of sending messages via SMS that promoted health preserving behaviour. The results were very positive. By sending a short, 2.5-minute clip to 25 million randomly selected individuals in West Bengal, the intervention i) found a two-fold increase in symptom reporting to village health workers, ii) increased hand washing rates by 7%, and iii) increased mask-wearing by 2%. While mask-wearing rates increased only marginally, the spillover effects (wearing a mask stops the virus from infecting more people) were moderately high and positive.

Asset Transfers and the Notion of Poverty:

An RCT by Banerjee in West Bengal involving a productive asset transfer accompanied with training found large and persistent effects on monthly consumption and other variables. The treatment group reported 25% higher consumption levels relative to the control group, who did not receive the asset transfer and training. Implications of such RCTs are huge. The notion that the poor are lazy and unwilling to perform strenuous labour is falsified by this RCT. Often, what the poor lack are opportunities that are hard to come by, given their financial status. A small nudge, like the asset transfer, can cause large and positive effects on their well-being.  

Salt fortification to reduce anaemia:

RCTs also help rule out less cost-effective interventions. Duflo and Banerjee evaluated an RCT which distributed fortified salt in 400 villages of Bihar, to reduce the prevalence of anaemia. However, this intervention found no statistically significant impact on health outcomes like anaemia, hemoglobin, etc.  Thus, while RCTs help introduce novel methods of impacting the lives of the poor, they also help in ruling out in-effective measures. A policy maker might try other alternatives to reduce the prevalence of anaemia.

Are RCTs the gold standard?

Maybe. Extrapolating results from a regional RCT to national policies could present problems. Contextuality matters. A study that indicates positive gains for one region might present different, and rather adverse effects for another region. Nation wide effects might not be as prominent as regional results of a single RCT. The good part is that Banerjee and Duflo have a solution. Just perform more RCTs!

Support us to bring the world closer

To keep our content accessible we don't charge anything from our readers and rely on donations to continue working. Your support is critical in keeping Global Views 360 independent and helps us to present a well-rounded world view on different international issues for you. Every contribution, however big or small, is valuable for us to keep on delivering in future as well.

Support Us

Share this article

Read More

February 4, 2021 4:44 PM

World's largest graveyard of Dinosaurs found in South Africa

In a village in the eastern cape of South Africa lies one of the most significant dinosaur sites ever found in the world. The site was discovered when a shepherd, Dumangwe Thyobeka found a large bone on his way to his great-grandparents’ graves, in 2015. He then took the bones to a local dinosaur enthusiast, James Rhalene. Commenting on this discovery " Mr. Rhalene said, "Growing up we were told dinosaurs were a myth, I thought they were only tales our grandparents would tell around the fire at story time", and It wasn't until reading some books that I started to believe they may be real. I've been looking into the existence of dinosaurs since 1982. He added, "You can imagine my excitement at being part of this and discovering them in my own backyard. I am so proud. Books will be written about our small village; the world will come to know of us through this discovery.”

These bones are more than 200 million years old, of around the end of the Triassic era and the beginning of the Jurassic one. When the village elder, Sginyane Ralane came to know about the discovery, he reached out to universities in South Africa for looking into it. The news eventually reached Prof. Jonah Choiniere from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and in 2018 Jonah and his colleagues started excavating the site. “It has been one of those places where you sometimes find yourself literally tripping over a dinosaur bone. There are very few other sites I've had the chance to work where we have this richness of fossils.” says Prof Paul Barett, a dinosaur expert at The Natural History Museum, UK, after he joined the team.

A reason why this area is abundant in fossils, Natural History Museum explains, is because of the ancient river systems in the area. The area is arid for most of the year now, and the rivers flow only seasonally. However, in the ancient times, there were vast river systems flowing year-round in the region, with wide, shallow rivers which would consequently form a layer of rock 210 million years old which is up to 500 meters thick in some regions. These rivers supported diverse wildlife, including ancestors of crocodiles, possibly those of turtles and mammals and fish, amphibians and reptile-like animals. The existence of such large rivers meant that dead animals nearby would be buried in sediment before they decomposed.  

This discovery is scientifically important for a number of reasons; the era from which these bones are found is a boundary in which a mass extinction occurred. Prof. Jonah is trying to understand how the animals from before that extinction survived and how they flourished after. In the Triassic era, there were multiple dominating animals, like the crocodiles, big mammal-like animals and dinosaurs. In the Jurassic era, however, the dinosaurs are clearly dominating. Why this happened is unclear, and the rocks and fossils from this site might help with that. There were also other animals along with dinosaurs in this site which make it noteworthy. Of the animals found, there were rauisuchians, which relate to modern-day crocodiles, and were dominant on land during the Triassic. The team also found cyclodonts and dicyclodonts, where the cyclodonts are the early ancestors to all mammals, and dicyclodonts are an even earlier branch of the mammalian family tree.

All of these have a significant impact on the community too; the team signed a memorandum of understanding with the local government with huge. After the signing, local officials visited the site at Qhemega. The team has been trying to use the heavy machinery they had brought for moving fossils for improving access in and to the village. They are also developing a curriculum in high schools to include topics about fossil sites and to add geography to the curriculum, to train the younger generation about the mapping used in excavation and in many other scientific fields especially relevant in the mineral-resource rich South Africa.

So far, this site has only provided benefits for everyone involved; new discoveries and confirming data for the scientific community, and economic access, increased opportunities and a matter for pride for the local community.

Read More