RANDOMISED CONTROL TRIAL

Economist and Nobel laureate Michael R Kremer has said that for a diverse populous country like India Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) must be carried out at multiple sites for better analysis of schemes and to see differences across the various states.

RCT was heavily discussed after Kremer and fellow economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in the area of Economics. They had made use of RCT for their research on poverty.

WHAT Is RCT?

It is an experimental form of impact evaluation in which the population receiving the program is chosen at random from the eligible population, and a control group is also chosen at random from the same eligible population.

It tests the extent to which specific, planned impacts are being achieved or how many targets have been achieved.
It involves dividing a population into various smaller groups, in order to comparatively see the outcomes of an external stimulus.
For example, if the aim of a study is to understand whether a free grains distribution scheme has helped in improving the nutrition levels among people living in a district, researchers will first create two groups within the population, and then put people into those groups randomly.
One group (called the control group) does not receive the grains or the external stimulus, while the other group (treatment group) does. After some period of time, details of how both the groups are doing would be collected.

Significance:

It helps to focus more on day-to-day answers to problems of poverty, deprivation, and problems in the delivery of basic amenities.

Criticism:

Critics said that randomization does not equalize two groups, and warned against over-reliance on RCTs to frame the policies.
There may be more women in one group, or one group may have more people having some kind of distinctiveness that affects the result. As a result, the outcomes may not give a correct picture, and the very use of a scientific experiment tool in social sciences was questioned.
RCT has also been criticized for reducing the study of poverty to small interventions which are unconnected to the lived experiences of the poor.

Source: The Indian Express

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