Bernard Eugine F

1611388

A note on the Guest lecture by Ms Shobhini Mukherji

Opinions are beliefs held by people that could have been influenced by facts, ideologies, feelings, etc
and are not necessarily substantiated by facts. Evidence, on the other hand, is a verifiable piece of
truth that could be measured, observed and proven. Policy making across the world tend to be
clouded by ideologies and generalized beliefs and opinions of people involved in decision making.
Opinion based policy making leads to uncertain outcomes and establishing causality between these
outcomes and the policies is cumbersome as well. Evidence based policy making involves a more
systematic, rigorous and rational approach of incorporating evidence from program evaluation to
make informed policy decisions. Policy makers face constraints in the form of political, administrative,
technical capabilities and funding to effectively generate and use evidence in decision making. But
increasing partnerships between research agencies like JPAL and policy makers are fostering a
movement towards evidence based policy making leading to effective interventions and efficient use
of resources.

Theory of change helps generate evidence to understand the outcomes of an intervention and map
the causality of these outcomes to specific policies. Despite the robustness of this approach, there are
issues that could hamper this process at different steps. Evidence generated could be of varying
quality and not in a digestible form. The policy makers might lack the capabilities to comprehend and
incorporate the synthesized evidence in the implementation of the policy. It is vital to measure the
impact in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the policy chosen based on the generated evidence.
The pollution audits policy changes that JPAL had helped the Gujarat government was an example of
how rigorous evidence and impact assessment could help in making informed policy making which
could be scaled up quickly as well. The difficulty in impact assessment in microfinance is attributed to
the problems that have cropped up recently and thereby emphasizing the importance of impact
assessment.

Impact assessment could also unearth interesting and surprising results as seen in the case of
effectiveness of cost effective programs like deworming and in the failure of programs like Biometric
devices for tackling absenteeism in doctors and improved cook stoves. The poor impact of business as
usual programs in improving the learning in elementary education and the subsequent effect of
improved pedagogy techniques like TaRL, developed by Pratham and evaluated by JPAL, emphasize
the impact evidence based policy making could have in creating effective and scalable programs.

Evidence based policy making should be supported by understanding the context and tweaking the
programs to local needs. Generalization of the evidence could lead to ineffective implementation of
the program in another region and could altogether lead to totally discarding the program as
ineffective. Theory based RCTs help in addressing the generalization problem yet implementation is
difficult as different kinds of evidence have to be evaluated.

Thus, a rigorous evidence based policymaking could help make informed decisions that could make
the world a better place for everyone.