Rajasthan Police have found a connection with Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Nina Singh, an IPS officer, has co-authored two research papers with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won the Nobel in Economic Sciences for their exemplary work on tackling poverty.

These papers co-authored by Nina Singh are based on police reforms and evidence-based policing in the context of Rajasthan.

These research initiatives were spread across 150 police stations of Rajasthan and were carried out over a period of four years.

Apart from this, Singh is also the first ADG of Rajasthan who has been awarded President's Medal.

She became an IPS officer in India after attaining her post-graduation from Harvard University.

Between 2004 and 2008, the two had undertaken a project to find out if incentives attract parents to get their children vaccinated in remote areas of Udaipur.

The study had concluded that providing incentives in addition to reliable services and education were more effective than providing services and education alone.

“Incentives cannot always be physical gifts. It may be automated calls which we can send to beneficiary families (parents of children vaccinated), congratulating them on vaccinating their children and encouraging them to get their children fully vaccinated. Nobel winners Banerjee and Duflo’s research on incentives in the state is useful and we can use it for increasing immunisation coverage,” Rohit Kumar Singh, additional chief secretary (health), health department, told The Times of India.

AFP

“Incentivising beneficiaries is a tool which agencies have been using for national programmes regularly. In the state’s Jhunjhunu district in 2011, the district collector had given a Nano car as incentive to those who got sterilised in a lucky draw. Impressed with the results in Jhunjhunu, such an incentive-based scheme was launched in Pali district too to achieve family planning targets,” reads the report.

“This was a unique project to study the efficacy of various reform interventions to improve performance at the police station level. Perhaps, it was the first study of this magnitude anywhere in the world. A set of interventions were tested in 162 police stations across 11 districts of Rajasthan on the basis of randomised control trials over a period of four years. The project generated hard evidence to show that which initiative worked at the police station level for informed decision making at the policy planning level. We also analysed the reasons for those interventions that did not work,” Singh told TOI.