Poverty on a petri dish

World Bank money is funding this driving test. A group of randomly selected people in New Delhi is busy trying to acquire driving licences. ...

World Bank money is funding this driving test. A group of randomly selected people in New Delhi is busy trying to acquire driving licences. The instructions are clear: be honest, one group is told. Another set is gently nudged toward touts swarming the RTO. Some are promised a 8216;bonus8217; if they get a licence real quick.

Everybody8217;s experience of bribes and babus is carefully noted and studied.

Then there8217;s a short driving test.

A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT at Cambridge, who are studying the nightmares of 8216;8216;bureaucratic corruption,8217;8217; will scientifically evaluate this on-going survey and driving test. Are the honest set better drivers?

8216;8216;We were not satisfied by simply producing high-quality research,8217;8217; MIT professor of economics Abhijit Banerjee told The Indian Express in an e-mail interview.

In June last year, professors of economics Banerjee, Esther Dufflo and Sendhil Mullainathan8212;with extensive experience studying racial bias in Kenya, USA, India and the Africas, education, health, agriculture and poverty8212;founded the Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

8216;8216;We8217;re convinced,8217;8217; says Banerjee, that policies designed to reduce poverty could be substantially more effective if scientific evidence was available . The lab doesn8217;t have test tubes, but work is based on rigorous evidence .8217;8217;

In sync with researchers at Harvard University, Princeton University, University of California, Berkley, and University of Chicago, random trials are on from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra to shanty towns in Kenya and Chicago.

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		nbsp;	In another experiment, researchers associated with the Lab recently sent resumes to newspaper ads for jobs in Boston and Chicago. Applications were randomly assigned a black-sounding name Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones or white-sounding name Emily Walsh, Brendan Baker. The result: White sounding names received 50 percent more call backs than the Black sounding names. Story continues below this ad	nbsp;

So last March, trekking through data from gram panchayats of West Bengal and Rajasthan, researchers Dufflo and Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, partnered by the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, found a distinct trail: 8216;8216;Women leaders invest more in infrastructure that relates to rural womens8217; concerns, like water and roads in West Bengal, water in Rajasthan. Men in West Bengal invested more in education.8217;8217;

The study8217;s main result maintained that 8216;8216;women are politically more active in village councils with a woman leader.8217;8217;

In a cluster of non-formal educational centres in Udaipur, teachers8212;known to attend only 60 per cent of the time8212;photograph the class at the start and end of the day.

An MIT researcher on this ongoing project checks the camera8217;s timestamp feature to determine when and for how long each school was open. A bonus awaits teachers with good attendance.

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In Bhopal, researchers funded by MIT and University of Chicago are trailing college-age students of upper and lower castes seeking engineering admissions. Tracking their future education and job opportunities, they8217;ll study and predict the impact of admission policy on future income, social standing.

The work culture of random trials is distinct, with an eye on 8216;8216;clear, unambiguous results.8217;8217; The idea is to permit local NGOs to focus resources on effective programmes. When extra teachers at informal schools in Rajasthan had no discernible impact on test scores, the programme was discontinued.