Across the world, many social programmes are now being evaluated on a randomised basis to the benefit of governments, policy planners and donor agencies like the World Bank etc. Probably the best example is the evaluation of the de-worming programme of school children in the district of Busia, Kenya (by Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer of Harvard University). Here, randomised evaluation led to the conclusion that the most cost-effective intervention to increase school attendance among rural children was providing de-worming tablets to the kids. Or closer home, where randomised evaluation by Sewa Mandir in rural Udaipur (by Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna and Stephan Ryan of Poverty Action Lab, MIT) confirmed that the digital camera intervention in rural government schools resulted in controlling teacher absenteeism and improved academic performance of the school children.

As the country expectantly looks forward to many more meaningful social initiatives, it will be prudent to simultaneously plan for concurrent randomised evaluation of the new programmes.

The writer is an IAS officer working in Rajasthan. The views expressed are personal