From time to time, Wooster alumni that are engaged in poverty reduction or social entrepreneurship will post to this blog. Below is a thought piece by Mihika Chatterjee. Mihika graduated in 2008 with an economics degree. Her Independent Study empirically assessed the effect of HIV on savings. She is the first Wooster student to work for MIT’s Poverty Action Lab. J-PAL’s mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence.
Growing up in Calcutta, I spent eighteen years as part of a middle-class, urban family, representing a segment of society that is the smiling face of “India Inc.” today. My parents strived to ensure that my interaction with poverty, destitution and impoverishment, so prevalent in my country, was limited, even absent. At Wooster, though intellectually cognizant of the issues facing India, my self-esteem and patriotism compelled me to profess: “we are not all about naked, malnourished children. We have been averaging a growth rate of 8 percent a year. Seriously!” I was delusional.
Conducting a survey in Orissa
If it were not for my experiences in Wooster – interactions with professors, experiences, I.S. – I would perhaps still be seeking comfort in the false notion of my country I liked to harbour. Today, I’ve spent a year and a half in an Indian universe parallel to that I grew up in.
Orissa is a beautiful state. The drive through the state is green, bumpy due to pot holes the size of craters, but green. There is step-farming on the hills on one side and lush, green paddy fields on the other. You can see a disproportionate number of women toiling along with men in the fields, using mostly unmechanised tools, traction animals and a tremendous will to survive. Western Orissa is rich in minerals – steel, aluminium and bauxite, amongst others. The state has one of Asia’s largest natural lakes that is rich in fish, a certain species of dolphin and migratory birds from Siberia (flying over it, of course). Situated on the eastern coast of India, the state has a narrow but long coastline running along it. Basically, Orissa screams ecotourism; in case any of you young, enterprising GSE products is interested, contact me to strike a deal.
Orissa, with all its endowment, should be a hotbed of prosperity and not the poster picture of Indian poverty that it is. As per the Indian planning commission (India) report of 2001, 47% of its people lived below the poverty line in 1999-2000, making it the poorest in the country. The state brings Bono’s fashionable “economic paradigm” theory to life like very few. I am continually perplexed by what I see here. But why? What stops it from developing?
Common theories suggest bad governance/leadership, corruption, historically strong feudal ties, and an inherently lazy population, among other equally frustrating causes. My favourite though is “lazy people.” Not only does the “west” say that about the “rest,” but even the “rest” says that about the “rest” when it finds no other way to explain poverty at its own doorstep. During a recent train journey, I got into a heated debate about poverty in Orissa with a young businessman trying to establish a new steel plant in a poor district. “Look, the people are just lazy. They don’t want to work,” he said. “Even if it means dying?” I asked. I didn’t really get a response. We moved on to politics instead.
In my limited experience and understanding, I have come to believe that poverty in Orissa is an endogenous outcome and not a hopeless, dismal exogenous fact. Giving cursory thought to some of the causes of poverty stated before, it is unsurprising to point out that most of them are rectifiable. Bad governance can be changed if we educate the voting mass, provide better alternatives to them, increase voter turnout, and … Corruption can be tackled with better leadership, active regulation … Historical feudal ties can be broken by effective implementation of land reforms, education and awareness of one’s rights … Of course, these are long-term processes of change, intensely complicated in nature, but the issues are rectifiable nevertheless. Not just effort, but the right kind of effort by the right kind of people may be the way out.
Billions of aid dollars are spent on poverty alleviation and development efforts every year. What programs work? Which do not? Do you need to alter programs according to culture and society? Does one-size-fit-all strategy work in certain essential areas of development? The only way to answer these questions is to evaluate the impact of programs and policies implemented by units as micro as NGOs or as macro as multilateral organizations.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (based at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts) evaluates impacts of programs geared towards social and economic development to facilitate better policymaking and more efficient allocation of resources. Founded by Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, Dr. Esther Duflo, and Dr. Sendhil Mullainathan, this research network uses randomized control trials (RCTs) to conduct rigorous impact evaluation, in more than 30 countries across the globe. Evidence provided by the research it has produced thus far is in part responsible for the scale up of effective programs that have been estimated to better 28 million lives.
I am working on an RCT experiment that aims to provide new evidence on the effects of interventions combating indoor air pollution in southern and western districts of Orissa. As women and children typically have the most exposure to the smoke from cooking stoves, the study is paying particular attention to the effect of the clean stoves on infant mortality, the physical development of children under age 5, amongst other pre and post-natal characteristics. It is the first study of its kind, in rigor and scope, attempting to not only evaluate the impact of a program on clean, cooking stoves, but also answering questions on linkages between respiratory health and household economics.
In the field of development, little things make big differences. It is not just about the “big push”; it is important to decide who should be pushed and how. What is more effective in increasing literacy: providing financial incentives to teachers or giving free meals to school children? What is more effective in decreasing AIDS amongst African teenagers: distributing free condoms or gainfully occupying them in schools? It has been fascinating to see how paying attention to little details in the field can make significant differences. I hope I’m not being delusional this time.
