Ex-IIM professor recalls Esther Duflo as a dedicated co-researcher

KOLKATA: Economist Raghav Chattopadhyay, who collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Esther Duflo on a research project that led to a path-breaking publication 15 years ago, says he has never met a researcher as sincere and dedicated as her, either before or after.


“Honestly, I have not seen anyone like her.

Working in Indian villages, where creature comforts are few and facilities rudimentary, can be challenging for any researcher, more so for a foreigner. But Esther was completely nonchalant about the surroundings when she was out on the field in Birbhum’s villages for a whole year. She did not have any demands on either her accommodation or diet. Nor did the searing heat in Birbhum’s summer deter her. Esther’s sole focus was work and she was totally immersed in it,” recounted Chattopadhyay, who was a professor of public policy and management at IIM-Calcutta at the time. Duflo was then Abhijit Banerjee’s PhD student. The two got married years later.

In the winter of 2000, Duflo and Chattopadhyay had set out to study the impact of women being elected to panchayats. Since a constitutional amendment in 1993, a third of panchayat seats had been reserved for women. But there were many skeptics with the general perception being that the elected women were mere rubber stamps with panchayats still controlled by their fathers, brothers or husbands.

Duflo and Chattopadhyay held a different belief. They felt that if given an opportunity, the women would prove their worth. And this was a huge opportunity. “Since a gram panchyat pradhan is an executive head who has to be in office from 10am to 5pm, we felt it would be impossible for fathers, brothers and husbands to monitor and control all their actions. By simply attending office, they would get to exercise their powers,” he explained.

What the duo set out to check was interventions, if any, by the elected women and whether they made any difference to the functioning of panchayats and its services. While the panchayats run by men became the control for the study, the ones that were led by women became the trials. It is pertinent to note here that back in 2000, panchayats hardly received funds and only oversaw the execution of projects like roads, school, education and healthcare.

Of the 165 panchayats in Birbhum, including 55 that were women run, a pilot study was first carried out involving five panchayats. These were then removed. Of the remaining 160, there were 50 women run panchayats. From each, three villages were randomly selected for the study.

Statistically, the results proved the general perception on women being mere faces wrong and endorsed the belief of Chattopadhyay and Duflo. The statistics that emerged revealed key differences in at least two major areas in women-run panchayats — water supply and roads.

“Tubewells in women-run panchayats were better maintained. Roads, too, were accorded higher priority. They were also intelligent enough to understand where they could not make an impact like primary schools, and did not waste time pursuing them,” said Chattopadhyay.

The paper that emerged from the study is considered a path-breaking one in Development Economics and was published in 2004 in Ecnometrica, one of the top-most journals in the subject.