'People-work'

  A Critique of Randomised Control Trials in Poverty Alleviation Last week, Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo received the Nobel for Economics for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” and for addressing “smaller, more manageable questions,” rather than big ideas. This experimental approach is based on so called Radomised Control Trials. Simply put, in such experiments, a randomly selected group of individuals (randomization is a method of removing bias) receive an intervention whose efficacy is being tested. Changes that result in the conditions of this random experiment group is compared with those in another ‘similar’ group of individuals (referred to as a ‘control group’) that was not provided the intervention. The difference in outcomes is directly attributed to the intervention. The RCT as a scientific research method is primarily widely practiced in clinical research to test the efficacy and safety of new pharmaceutical products/tr...

  SDGs are our dreams gone official I t is because we dream of a perfect future is why the present becomes worth the fight. Exactly one year ago in September 2015, all nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN general Assembly. At this gathering of world leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi endorsed the #globalgoals , committing himself and all of us to their achievement by 2030. And this is what is dazzling about these 17 new goals and their 169 targets. Three generations, including ours, have lived through the struggles and victories of the last hundred years, but it is only now for the first time that we have collectively started dreaming about the world through the eyes of a future generation, our children. What kind of world will your little daughter find herself in when she is a young adult? Will she be surrounded by prosperity, beauty, peace, dignity and equality for them, or will she find herself struggling in a broken planet ...

  One year since the SDGs – how committed is the Indian Parliament? Sustainable development goals (SDGs) are proof that the conversation on the intersectionality between economic, social and environmental change has finally come of age and is now hard to ignore. These new set of 17 global goals, along with their 169 targets are not just transformative in their ambition for the last person in the queue. They are in fact inviting us to participate in the tectonic shift in development thinking, to step out of our comfort zones to examine new solutions and new ways of doing business. And lets remember, these goals were generated through four years of participation of millions of people around the world and not by a bunch of experts huddled in a basement.   However, in India, the discussion on pathways to achieve the goals have, over the past year, become the domain of central and state level bureaucrats who haven’t amassed any significant glory for their ability and inclinat...