Mainstream Weeklyby Suranjita Ray
It is pertinent to acknowledge that poverty is one of the biggest hindrances to human development and a challenge to the policy- makers. Since any universal or objective interpretation of poverty undermines its essential characteristics, a comprehensive understanding makes it significant to move beyond its narrow meaning to comprehend the everyday experiences. Therefore, despite the differences on the method/approach/pedagogical device to understand poverty, the general agreement has been to privilege the concrete and actual of experiences of poverty across the globe.
A Paradigm Shift
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, helped conceptualise a powerful experi-mental evidence-based approach to alleviating global poverty by breaking the larger problem into smaller manageable problems and measuring the specific outcomes through Randomised Control Trials (RCT). As a well-known technique in medical trials, RCT is applied to real-life situations in which two sets of individuals/households that are similar are randomly selected and one set, termed as the