Its simple

Harish Hande, the founder of SELCO, won the Magsasay award for 2011. In an interview with Mint, he says -

"...I think it would be how do you motivate people from any type of university to actually say that there are 600 million at the other end of our country. If you take my own example, I am from IIT Kharagpur Rourkela, I have lived a complete subsidy life. Somebody paid for my electricity bills, IIT was paid by the Indian taxpayers, I went to the US on US taxpayer’s money. I am complete subsidy product. And then after all this subsidy, somebody like me wants to make money in the Bay area and settle down. How do you reverse that? If you want to make money, make money but then pay for everything..."

BASIX going down?

Unnecessary pain...See here for more

Insights into female voting behaviour in rural Pakistan

Chris Blattman flags a new World Bank paper by Ghazala Mansuri and Xavier Gine. The authors find that information dissemination (of the nature of pre-election voting awareness camapigns) increased voting among women by about 12% on average. Alongside this enhanced political participation, women also displayed greater degrees of independent decision-making when it came to voting for their chosen candidates. In addition, the study finds significant levels of information spill-overs, making such interventions scale-able. The authors report these findings by -

conducting a field experiment to assess the impact of information on female turnout and independence of candidate choice. The setting for the experiment is rural Pakistan where women still face significant barriers to effective political participation, despite legislative reforms aimed at enhancing female participation in public life (Zia and Bari, 1999).

Kudos to the researchers for choosing rural Pakistan, and not some part of say, rural India (far easier from a logistics and security point of view). The intervention and the research methods make for great reading. An interesting folllow-up would be to go back to these communities and present these results. It would be great to get their thoughts on these findings. Also, a couple of questions come to mind -

1. In the light of these findings, would political parties be inclined to step-up their voter outreach campaigns? - In this study, the vote-share of the losing political party seems to have gone up as a result of the information campaign intervention.
2. Do voters (men and women) truly understand that 'every vote counts'? Or do they go out to vote only to reward, punish or under other patron-client relationships? - Is linked to the point above - if voters didn't think that their vote counted, why would they have gone out and voted for the party that was almost sure to lose anywhichway?

Treated women also voted in larger numbers for PML-F which was seen as less likely to win, thereby changing the vote share of the losing party in sample polling stations. This is perhaps even more remarkable given that the field teams were mostly PPPP supporters. This suggests that the intervention empowered women and thus may have modified the rational calculus of voting (Downs, 1957) by including a utility gain from the mere act of voting (Riker and Ordeshook, 1968)

More praise for Esther Duflo

Chris Udry, writing about Esther, says -

There are few precedents for Esther in our profession; right from the start of her career as a new assistant professor, she has taken on a rare combination of professional roles as a cutting-edge researcher, a catalyst of research for a new generation of scholars, a policy activist, and a public intellectual. Instead of diffusing her impact, this coupling of her intellectual agenda with her passionate social activism has begun to reshape scholarship, policy, public debate, and the everyday lives of many of the world’s poor.

Definitely worth reading in full. As RCTs gain in importance, its flag bearers need to combine their academic brilliance with a willingness to subject themselves to higher levels of public scrutiny. The role of the academic-policy activist goes a long way in dispelling notions of academics being confined to their ivory towers.

PS: I have enormous respect for Chris and have always been impressed by his ability to lucidly synthesise. He does the same with Esther's body of work in this paper. Another example - this one from his own work on agriculture in Africa, is here.

The rich and famous II

In a previous post, I had written about gods in India that not only own billions, but also want to try their luck in stocks and shares. An article I saw today reports an ongoing treasure hunt in Sree Padmanabha Swamy temple in Trivandrum, Kerala that has exceeded INR 90,000 crore ($20 bn) at the time of reporting. At a time that fake gods and their trusts are under investigation, this is fun stuff.

The temple website itself reports -

Around 90,000 crore worth treasure (Nidhi) has been found in the secret cellars of the famous Kerala Temple dedicated to Lord Vishnu - Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram). The 7 member paper appointed by the Supreme Court of India, has been preparing the list of valuable found in the cellars of Sri Padmanabhaswami Temple. The temple has 6 Secret Cellars (Nilavara – a place to keep assets safe) from Cellar A to Cellar F. Opening of each of these chambers is revealing a virtual treasure trove with precious diamonds, golden ornaments, emeralds, jewelleries, rare antique silver and brass platters and golden idols...

TOI helpfully reports that this exceeds Kerala's public debt which is around INR 71,000 crore - fair enough that there are debates on whether the treasure belongs to the state treasury or the temple. Will Padmanabha Swamy at least pay an inheritance tax? or a windfall gains tax, maybe?