TOI'

Shankar Raghuraman

spoke to Nobel laureate

Abhijit Banerjee

on the significance of the prize and what he expects it will do for the school of

economics

that seeks hard evidence to back policy interventions:

Q. Beyond a personal sense of validation or vindication, is there a larger significance you see in this prize?

Q. Do you think governments are more likely to take the movement seriously now than they have so far or was that already happening?

Q. In particular, do you think it will make the Indian government more likely to listen?

Q. Have you found it tougher to get Indian academia to take you seriously than governments?

Q. But do they take you seriously also in the sense of them doing more empirical work, looking for hard evidence?

Q. Given the kind of work you do, how much of a constraint is it that in India data is difficult to come by?

I think of us as being a whole movement, people looking for hard evidence and not shooting their mouths off. I think this is a sort of validation for that (randomised control trials) movement. To that extent, it is an important moment, not just for us. I think we were lucky to be at the beginning, but we are part of a larger movement. And the movement has succeeded to a much greater extent than we ever thought. We have over 400 professors doing research and we get some reflected glory from that. The movement is based on important principles of skepticism, not being intimidated by authority, willingness to ask questions about established truths and common wisdom. That’s how our work goes. So this has some significance in that sense.It has improved a lot. It is not where it used to be. People are more willing to listen already, but I hope this will add further to that and that’s a good thing.I hope it will. In fact, we have very good partnerships with a bunch of governments in India. We typically don’t work with the federal government in India because it doesn’t do so much implementation. Our connections are more with state governments and we work with Tamil Nadu , West Bengal, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Rajasthan , Odisha … a bunch of state governments. So it’s not that we have no connections in government but obviously we are not connected to everybody or everything that happens.No, I think at this point academia too takes us seriously. For a while that was true. Esther (Duflo) tells the story of a 28-year old small white woman being treated with a slightly contemptuous air by senior academics, obviously most of them males, but that’s no longer true. I have lots of grey hair now and they take me more seriously.Yes, yes. That is definitely happening.India is not too bad. There are countries where data is better, like Indonesia, and there are countries where good quality data is more difficult to find, like China, and then there are countries where there is virtually no data. India is somewhere near the middle of this spectrum, so it’s not so bad.