Delhi govt advisory body ties up with J-PAL

Esther Duflo, left, and Abhijit Banerjee stand together following a news conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Oct. 14, 2019. Banerjee and Duflo, along with Harvard’s Michael Kremer, were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering new ways to alleviate global poverty. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

A key Delhi government advisory body has signed an agreement with J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) South Asia, co-founded by Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, for real-time monitoring of public services.

The partnership between the Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi (DDC) and J-PAL is aimed at improving quality of services, identifying service delivery issues, and motivating frontline staff to perform duties better, the government said in a statement.

As a pilot, the researchers will study the beneficiary experience in ration shops under the public distribution system (PDS) and mohalla clinics. The beneficiaries will be selected randomly across Delhi for the phone-based survey. In 2015, the Delhi government had relied on the research work of Banerjee and Duflo in designing its ‘Chunauti’ programme, aimed at improving learning levels in schools.