Research should not be driven by politics, says Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee

Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, during his first visit to Mumbai after winning the Nobel Prize, said, “Syllabus should not be dictated by a committee whose aspirations determine it. It should be locally decided by institutions depending on the needs.”

Banerjee on Saturday attended the 25th anniversary celebration of Pratham, a not-for-profit group working in the field of school education. Banerjee did some of his early work in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in the late 1990s with Pratham. RCT uses experiments conducted on the ground to assess the impact of welfare programmes.

When asked if RCT-based research was an answer to systemic issues — such as poorly-trained teachers, lack of adequate infrastructure — that plague the education system, he said governments have to play an active role in fixing these issues. “RCTs don’t fix education systems. People fix systems,” he said.

Banerjee later gave a public talk titled ‘Learning from evidence for a better future: The case of Primary Education’. He stressed on the importance of evidence-based research saying, “It’s because it makes you ask smarter questions. It makes you develop the next set of questions.”

Emphasising the importance of research and research institutes in the country, he said, “We do need to invest in research. Encouraging a free, open research climate is important, and research should be intellectually driven.”

He also highlighted the significance of a good regulatory body to ensure that syllabi are not driven by political motives. “Even the content coming from teachers can be politically driven, which is why we need to have a regulatory framework in place,” he said.