From the Executive Director
2021 has been difficult but rewarding for J-PAL South Asia. We endured a devastating outbreak of Covid-19 in the beginning of the year. The crisis, in hindsight, brought the tight-knit J-PAL South Asia community even closer. It also illuminated growing demand for J-PAL South Asia’s research, policy, and training expertise.
The pandemic threatens to undo India’s decades of progress on poverty reduction, and policymakers recognize this challenge. We continued to test policy solutions and shared insights with key decision-makers on reducing the socioeconomic shocks of Covid-19, especially for vulnerable population groups such as women, children, and the elderly.
This has also meant stronger relations at the highest levels of the government. We offered policy recommendations to the Ministry of Finance after a comprehensive review of global evidence and continued to advise the Indian government’s policy think tank, the NITI Aayog, on conducting impact evaluations. Our partnership with REC Limited, under the Ministry of Power, promises a more reliable power supply to households.
A significant portion of our work this year was underpinned by the efforts of the Innovations in Data and Experiments for Action (IDEA) Lab team. The ability to securely and ethically collect, aggregate, and analyze high-quality administrative data has become vital for effective policymaking today.
I am proud of what we achieved in this difficult year while being aware there is much more that needs to be done. I hope in 2022 we are able to build on our strengths and redouble our efforts to deliver policy guidance based on rigorous evidence and data. Your support has been invaluable. Thank you for the faith you have shown in us.
J-PAL South Asia Leadership
The Year in Review
Advised the highest levels of the Tamil Nadu government
We fortified our relationship with Tamil Nadu, one of our oldest state partners, following J-PAL Director Esther Duflo’s appointment to the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister’s Economic Advisory Council in June 2021. The government formally adopted Esther’s recommendation to reform the pension program, which will benefit up to 4.8 million elderly people, especially those living alone. These recommendations were drawn from ongoing research carried out by J-PAL South Asia and the Tamil Nadu government.
Strengthened partnerships with India's national government
We provided policy recommendations to India’s Ministry of Finance based on evidence from evaluations in the areas of agriculture, climate change, education, gender, health, and private sector growth, developed after a careful examination of India’s policy priorities and challenges. We continued to work closely with NITI Aayog’s Development Monitoring and Evaluation office, which is mandated to monitor and evaluate public programs; we led customized training and knowledge-sharing events and provided guidance on future training curriculums.
Scaled up evidence-informed programs
We partnered with the Government of Punjab and the NGO Breakthrough to introduce an evidence-informed curriculum promoting gender equality among adolescents in 4,500 state-run schools in Punjab, building on the program’s success in Haryana. We are also working with our longtime collaborator Pratham to expand the Math Games program, a teaching technique developed to improve foundational math skills of children from economically disadvantaged groups. The program will be rolled out in state-run schools in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab.
Strengthened health care services
The IDEA Lab team launched the Health Insurance Data Use project to strengthen health care services for the poor with a grant of US$700,000 from the Global Innovation Fund. We formalized collaborations with three state governments in India with the goal to identify and plug gaps in health care service delivery. The project will leverage existing administrative data and combine them with surveys to develop innovative interventions that can improve health outcomes in these states.
The Year Ahead
Strengthen state partnerships to scale effective programs
We will leverage the learnings from our state partnerships to further expand our model of institutionalizing evidence-informed decision-making. This includes widening the scope of our partnerships with the state governments of Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Punjab, and exploring new state-level collaborations. We will work with these governments to inform new policy and scale up evidence-informed solutions in areas including improving school readiness, gender sensitization of adolescents, boosting immunization demand, and livelihoods support for women experiencing extreme poverty.
Expand training to meet high demand
We will explore opportunities in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to enter long-term government partnerships and organize custom courses for governments, NGOs, donors, multilateral organizations, and academic institutions. We also aim to develop a training curriculum focused on climate- and energy-related impact evaluations to equip policymakers with the skills needed to improve measurement and understanding of the impact of their programs.
Creating Opportunities for India-Based Researchers
J-PAL South Asia launched the Indian Scholars Program (ISP) in 2021 to support researchers based at Indian institutions in driving the research agenda on development policy in the country. Fourteen accomplished researchers from six universities across India were selected in the program’s inaugural year, receiving a total of US$220,190 in research funding.
These researchers will examine ways to improve health outcomes for women and children as well as to increase women's participation in the labor force. Projects will be funded through J-PAL’s Cash Transfers for Child Health Initiative and Gender and Economic Agency Initiative. ISP represents the latest step taken by J-PAL South Asia to deepen and expand its network of India-based researchers.
Indian Scholars spotlight:
Dr. Rashmi Barua’s ISP research project aims to examine the difficulties households face in accessing arsenic-free water in Assam’s Jorhat district, one of India’s most contaminated regions. Dr. Barua works at the Centre for International Trade and Development at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She studies education and labour markets, with a special focus on gender and early childhood education and health, and received a PhD in economics from Boston University.
Dr. Tirtha Chatterjee’s ISP research project will test the effects of providing affordable child care services on women’s employment rates in the southern Indian city of Kerala. Dr. Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Kerala. She studies agriculture, food and nutrition policy, labour and development economics, and received a PhD in development studies from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development and Research.
Credits:
Breakthrough