Researcher Spotlight: Harini Kannan on partnering with government to scale evidence-informed programs across India

This podcast and blog series brings together researchers reflecting on their experiences conducting impact evaluations in India. From working in diverse local contexts to engaging with government and civil society, each episode offers a window into the realities of producing policy-relevant evidence on the ground. 

In this episode of the Researcher Spotlight Conversation Series, host Sambhav Choudhury speaks with J-PAL affiliated professor Sandip Sukhtankar, Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia. He discusses the unique challenges and rewards of conducting research with law enforcement agencies, offers practical strategies for maintaining government partnerships despite personnel changes, and explores the nuanced role of technology in social protection programs.

Want to learn more? Explore other podcast episodes in this series where we speak with Shobhini Mukerji on her journey into development economics, Ariel Zucker on applying economic theory to real-world solutions, Harini Kannan on scaling evidence-informed programs with governments, and Gautam Rao on co-producing evidence with policymakers.

[Transcript]

Sambhav Choudhury: Hi everyone, welcome to an episode of J-PAL South Asia's Researcher Spotlight conversation series. My name is Sambhav Choudhury, and I am a research associate at J-PAL South Asia. Today I'm talking to Sandip Sukhtankar, who is a professor in the Economics Department at the University of Virginia. His research interests are in development economics, political economy, and public economics, with a particular focus on corruption, governance, and the delivery of public benefits and services. Sandip's non-academic interests are as exciting as his research. He's an avid cricket fan since childhood and is now also a practicing ceramicist. Research associates that work with him are regularly in awe of how Zen he is. Hi Sandip, thanks for talking to us today.  

Sandip Sukhtankar: Hi Sambhav, thanks for having me.

Sambhav: The first question that we have for you is relating to your paper "Increasing Access to Security and Justice Through Women's Help Desks in Police Stations in India," in which you study the impact of women help desks on registration rates of cases of gender-based violence. Can you briefly tell us how it was working on this project in India and some of the advantages and challenges of running an intervention in this context?

Sandip: Sure. This has been a very, very interesting project for me. It's the first project in which I've worked with the police, and I knew very little about the police before I started working with them. So, for example, the fact that police in India generally don't get any leave—like during the week, Sunday is not off, holidays that other people get are not off. In fact, that means double time for them since they're working policing festivals or whatever else there is.

So it's a very interesting context, and I'm really glad that it worked out. And the way it worked out was also super interesting because it was not us reaching out to them, but it was the Madhya Pradesh Police Department reaching out to Iqbal, and then J-PAL and Iqbal and Abhijit bringing me on to meet with them.

It was super interesting to work in this context. I think it worked because of the stakeholder interest. Otherwise, I think it would be very challenging because even after we had very strong support within the police, there were also other factions who were not as keen on working with researchers and not as keen on sharing data or being open to running an intervention that might fail and then have us write a paper that suggests that there was something that didn't work.

Now in this case, some parts of the intervention did work, and the paper got published very nicely, and they got some nice publicity out of it too. So I think it all worked out, but there's lots of advantages and challenges of running an experiment with a sector like the police, which is very understudied and super, super interesting.

Sambhav: Thanks, Sandip. So often when we work on projects with governments, there are personnel changes within the department and new stakeholders that we have to work with for the same project. So in your experience, what key factors or strategies have proven effective in maintaining strong partnerships with government departments despite this barrier?

Sandip: Yes, this—as anyone who's worked with the government knows—this is one of the biggest challenges: the change in personnel. You'll have a secretary or joint secretary who's super enthusiastic about experiments or research and will be giving you all support, and you're just about ready to launch your project, and they get transferred.
So this is a situation that all of us have faced, and I think there's ways in which you can prepare, but I think we have to be open to the fact that this is just the arena in which we work, and if things don't work out, they won't work out.

But some of the things that we can do to avoid them—I think having written MoUs and a file in the government is always important. Government puts a lot of stock in paperwork, so an existing file that's been there on the project and sitting and signed off on somehow has some cache. I'm not saying it has all the cache, but I think it has some cache.

And then I think just building personal relationships with people who will be there for a longer term, maybe people who are either higher or lower in the hierarchy than, say, the secretary. So either way, you can use those connections and relationships to keep building, keep the continuity in the project going.
So I think those are probably the two things that are most effective, but nothing, of course, is foolproof.

Sambhav: You're also one of the researchers on the Payments and Governance Research Program that aims to understand the impact of direct benefits transfers models on public finances and the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs. In this context, could you throw some light on how technology has helped you in exploring these ideas?

Sandip: Yeah, so technology is very interesting. In fact, I just finished writing a handbook chapter on digital technology in social protection. And I think what I've learned, and what we as researchers who work in this area have learned, is that technology by itself doesn't really do anything good or bad, right? It's the protocols around its use, it's how it's being employed that really matters.

So, for example, take the case of using Aadhaar-based authentication to authenticate beneficiaries getting some kind of benefit. You could, on the one hand, it could reduce fraud and corruption. On the other hand, it could increase exclusion, right? The people who may not have Aadhaar or whose fingerprints don't get authenticated may stand to lose their benefits.

And so in this case, the success overall of the technology is based on what protocols do you have in place to, let's say, figure out, stop workarounds to and prevent corruption. What protocols do you have in place as backups for people who cannot authenticate? And these tend to be the most vulnerable, right? So how can you protect them?

So I think the big takeaway on technology is just that you need to be careful about designing the protocols, and it's how you use it that can lead to benefits or potential disadvantages.

Sambhav: Thanks, Sandip. So, given your extensive fieldwork experience in South Asia, what advice would you offer to emerging researchers or budding economists interested in pursuing a career in development economics?

Sandip: I think probably just be open to questions and be observant, and research questions can come from anywhere. You know, they're often not going to come to you from reading economics papers. They're probably going to come to you from interesting conversations that you have with random people, or something that you notice as a pattern when you're traveling.

So, in that sense, for me at least, I think there is no substitute to actually being in the field and talking to people and observing how programs are working or how they're not working.

So I feel, for example, I feel particularly energized—I just spent a few days in JPAL and in Madhya Pradesh doing sort of extending some of the research we've been doing as well as trying to start off new projects. So I ended up speaking to something like 300 newly recruited constables in the police force, and it was just really, really interesting to see their perspective and hear about their complaints as well as how they feel about working on the job, and then link that to what's going on with labor markets in India overall.

So yeah, I think something like this is fantastic for generating ideas.

Sambhav: Thanks, Sandip, that's quite fascinating. The final question that I had for you was: what research projects or areas are you currently excited about or planning to explore in the near future?

Sandip: Yeah, so that's a great segue since the project that I was trying to launch in Bhopal is something that I'm very excited about. It involves newly recruited constables in the Madhya Pradesh police, but from the angle of female labor force participation.

And these, as you might know, any government job is sort of super valued. So about a million people applied for 6,000 or so positions. But even after that, a fair number of them drop out for other lucrative government positions or other issues, especially in the cases of the women constables if they're posted far from home or don't have the support networks and things like that.
So some of the things that we're trying to do are looking at interventions that might help the police retain these women constables, help them improve job satisfaction, and of course, overall performance in the police.

So I think that's super interesting given the broad context of unemployment in India as well as female labor force participation in India. And I think there's lots of fascinating, just some fascinating descriptive work that we can do as well as the experimental work.

Sambhav: Yeah, that sounds quite interesting, and as someone who's interested in labor markets, I look forward to reading more about this project. Thank you, Sandip, that was quite interesting, and thank you for this conversation.

Sandip: Great, thanks.
 

This podcast and blog series brings together researchers reflecting on their experiences conducting impact evaluations in India. From working in diverse local contexts to engaging with government and civil society, each episode offers a window into the realities of producing policy-relevant evidence on the ground. 

In this episode of the Researcher Spotlight Conversation Series, host Sambhav Choudhury speaks with Shobhini Mukerji, Executive Director of J-PAL South Asia. From her transformative summer internship with education nonprofit Pratham to becoming a principal investigator on groundbreaking research, Shobhini shares her journey into development economics and experimental approaches.

Want to learn more? Explore other podcast episodes in this series where we speak with Sandip Sukhtankar on his research in India, Ariel Zucker on applying economic theory to real-world solutions, Harini Kannan on scaling evidence-informed programs with governments, and Gautam Rao on co-producing evidence with policymakers.

[Transcript]

Sambhav: Hi everyone, welcome to an episode of J-PAL South Asia's Researcher Spotlight conversation series. My name is Sambhav, and I'm a Research Associate at J-PAL South Asia. 
Today I'm talking to Shobhini Mukerji, who is the Executive Director of J-PAL South Asia. Shobhini oversees the pan-India operations of J-PAL South Asia, which has partnerships with over 16 state governments and several central government agencies. 

Shobhini works closely with donors, policy makers, civil society partners, and research institutions to promote collaboration, to increase the use of evidence in decision making, and scale-ups of successful social programs in India. She wears many hats: fearless leader of a cutting-edge organization, education expert, lover of J-PAL staff parties, and a bonafide foodie. But in this conversation, we wanted to focus on one of your incredible roles: being a principal investigator on some of the most exciting education projects at J-PAL South Asia. Hi Shobhini, thanks for talking to us today.

Shobhini Mukerji: Thanks Sambhav, thanks for having me here, and look forward to the conversation.

Sambhav: So we would love to begin by asking you, what got you interested in development economics and the experimental approach?

Shobhini Mukerji: Back in 2001, when I was preparing to do an MBA in a college in India, I was studying for the entrance exams and I took up a summer internship with Pratham, one of the largest education nonprofits in India, which works with underprivileged children to build their foundational literacy and numeracy. And that changed the course of my life. It was my introduction to development and to the space of education more specifically.

So I've always been a numbers person and also quite computer savvy, and we're talking about the late 1990s when we used to have very clunky software and the dial-up BSNL internet was slowly making its way to India. And my father taught me my computer skills. He got me a Windows Dummy series, this black and yellow book through which I taught myself Excel, Access, and Word. And Access was the main programming software at that point of time.

And Pratham hired me for the summer of 2001 to set up the databases in Access for tracking out-of-school children in their bridge classes in the Delhi government schools. So I ended up working in Pratham for almost 5 years, from the urban slums in Delhi to the villages of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan. And my main work was conducting surveys, doing pre-post assessments, and you know what we call dipstick surveys to test reading and math levels of children in government schools and in Pratham's community bridge classes. And I had a lot of conversations with parents, with teachers, with children on what education and learning meant to them.

I was also part of the first core team that launched the ASER surveys in 2005, which is now a seminal survey that happens annually across India to reach more than 3 million children to gauge their learning levels. And I remember at that time, around that time, when I was first introduced to the experimental approach—RCTs as we call them—through researchers like Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, who were working with Pratham at that time with Rukmini Banerji, who's now the CEO of Pratham, to study the impact of community involvement and participation of local elected leaders in taking steps to improve learning in the village schools. And I was intrigued, to say the least, with the whole treatment and control approach, which was quite new to me.

Soon after this experience, I left to study MSc in Social Research Methods at LSE with a major in social and development policy. And it was here that I was properly introduced to RCTs as a methodology to study causal impact. And I was hired by Esther after I completed my MSc to join her and Rema Hanna and Michael Greenstone as their research associate in Orissa in 2007 to study the impact of smokeless stoves on the health of women and children through an RCT. And we were working with Gram Vikas at that point of time.
And I was quite fascinated by the precision at the ground level that it took to conduct an RCT, from the survey design to the questionnaire testing, piloting, and most importantly, the rigor with which it took to understand attrition, spillovers, contamination. And what struck me most about the approach of RCTs is that we can take seemingly large rhetorical questions like "How do we end global poverty?" "How do we improve the health of people?" and break it down into a number of smaller but more precise questions at an individual or a group level. And then we answered each of these questions through a specifically designed experiment that tells you whether the solution works or not, and it assigns causality, which is quite neat. And we've applied this to many fields, from learning to health to political participation to using nudges and incentives to improve service delivery and take-up, and so on.

Sambhav: Thanks Shobhini, that was quite an inspiring journey. So some of our listeners are budding economists and are contemplating whether or not to consider the PhD track. Your career as a PI is very inspiring. Could you please tell us how you perceive the value of PhD training in being a good researcher?

Shobhini Mukerji: I will confess that I don't have a PhD. After coming back from LSE, you know, each year I would go back to Rukmini and Esther, who have been my mentors, you know, whether I should do a PhD or not. And they would ask me, "Why? What is your burning question? What is your motivation?" And we would always conclude at the end of that conversation that my work between Pratham and J-PAL was akin to doing many PhDs.

And no doubt that PhD gives a very strong theoretical base. I've come to believe that in the development space, fieldwork is invaluable in giving a good practical grounding, and shadowing professors and working closely with them can also give you a strong theoretical grounding. So I'm not saying don't do a PhD, but commit if you're very certain and think deeply about the problem statement that you're trying to solve for.
I got lucky because I had an opportunity to work with Esther, Jim Berry, Mark Shotland as a PI on a project in Haryana on an evaluation. It's a learning evaluation actually, which laid the foundation for the teacher-led model of Teaching at the Right Level. And I learned so much from that experience that the PhD could not have taught me. And also, many of the projects that I worked on, they did not have the impacts that I hoped for, and there were some important lessons in there on the failures. Again, a PhD won't teach you that.

So I'll stop here and say that commit to a PhD if you're certain, have a problem statement you're trying to solve for. If you're clear that you want to be an academic, definitely do a PhD. If you want to join the World Bank or have a doctor tag which looks good on your CV, then that is your motivation. Recognize that. But it's a high price to pay, and PhD is a lonely road. It's an individual journey.

Sambhav: Thanks Shobhini, this is actually solid advice for me and my peers who are on the fence about doing a PhD right now. So the next question that we had for you was relating to your experience working with state governments and government agencies. What key factors or strategies have proven effective in forming partnerships with governments or other stakeholders for your project?

Shobhini Mukerji: Now, India is fortunate to have some of the brightest and most thoughtful policymakers in the world, both inside and outside the government. And our ability, in a large part, to carry out these large-scale experiments of the policy interventions relies on their willingness to hear us out, their willingness to give us a chance to demonstrate the impacts of the program through the experimental approach.
And the more that we have been working with policymakers, I think there are few things that we've learned along the way. I personally like to call it the snakes and ladders of evidence-informed policymaking. And perhaps the biggest ladder for all of us is finding the right champion. So when you find the right champions, that can take you a very long way.

And in fact, one of our largest, most extensive partnerships with the government has been with the Tamil Nadu government under the guidance of Mr. Krishnan, then the Principal Secretary in Planning in Tamil Nadu, along with Iqbal Dhaliwal, our Executive Director. And what we did at that point of time when we launched the partnership in 2013—it began with months-long policy dialogue that brought together a dozen professors, researchers from JAPAL, secretaries from various governments across different departments, and they discussed these key priorities of the state and the latest scientific evidence we have from around the world on these issues, which led to the design of very innovative pilots that address several challenges in the state.

Which brings me to the second most important ladder, as I like to call it, is listening and being responsive to their priorities and being connected at all times. We've done this through policy dialogues, and every engagement between a government and organization like J-PAL, you know, it helps both sides better understand how policymakers and researchers can partner to design, evaluate, and scale up these innovative solutions based upon the problem statements at hand.

And in the last decade, we've learned how hard it can be to align with the needs and constraints of policymakers and researchers, but yes, once you do align, then how beneficial such partnerships can be. So the alignment is the most important here, and it takes time and relationship building, trust to get the senior decision-makers to commit their time to our approach.

And then the last thing I'll say in terms of an insight that we've learned is, you know, putting down the essential nuts and bolts for building a successful bridge between researchers and policymakers through an institutional setup and a system of collaboration. So beyond the individual project or collaboration that we have is a larger commitment that gets recorded through an MOU, a steering committee, or an advisory committee that meets and debates and approves each project. And it has participation of senior officials from the Chief Secretary to the Principal Secretary of the nodal departments, department secretaries that we're engaging with, and the senior leadership from our end, including bringing in our researchers at the table as well.

Because one thing that—one of the biggest snakes that we've seen that pulls you down is transfers, and we're in it for the long game, frankly. So it's important to be able to stick it out and play that long game using some of these strategies.

Sambhav: This is quite interesting, Shobhini. So the next question that we had was about your thoughts on the broader perspective. So how do you see your work improving the lives of people and affecting policy decisions?

Shobhini Mukerji: J-PAL's mission is to inform policies based on evidence and in the most rigorous way. But rubber really meets the road when you take the evidence and you turn it into a program that has the potential to reach millions of people through a scale-up. And at JAPAL, we have devoted considerable resources over the past two decades to the science part of scaling.
So we've had several successes, now, whether it's sustainable livelihoods to break the poverty trap for a million women in Bihar, or whether it's improving foundational learning for over 60 million children in India or Africa. So today, the research that we've done has positively impacted over 600 million lives globally and 300 million in India alone.

So taking a step back, while these programs individually scale and improve millions of lives across continents, it is still not enough given the magnitude of the challenges that we face and will continue to face into the future. So there will be new challenges, and the solutions will be different—some new, some old—and we will need to have more rigorous evidence to inform these solutions.
So for our work to be truly impactful, J-PAL will have to find a way to have many seats on many tables. We have a lot to say, so I hope we can change that and do more on the scaling and policy influence equation in the future.

Sambhav: Thank you, Shobhini. Lastly, could you describe a memorable experience from your fieldwork that significantly shaped your research or perspective?

Shobhini Mukerji: Well, it's a lovely question, Sambhav, and there's not one particular experience that comes to mind. Each time I'm in the field, I come away with so many memorable conversations, meetings, insights from the field, and each of these has shaped my perspective. And of course, we input that into research.
So whether it is my time in Orissa chopping wood, rescuing frogs out of abandoned mud stoves, or conducting arm sambas on stray dogs in villages in Uttar Pradesh... So there was one time when I had gone on a surprise field visit in Madhya Pradesh, and we traveled all day to reach a remote village, and the school was almost getting over by the time I reached. And I won't forget what I saw: one teacher and one child in the school, deeply engrossed in teaching and learning. That is it.

I learned later on that the village had just one school-age child, and it was a single-teacher government primary school with just one child studying. And the teacher came every day to teach the girl, and she went every day to learn. So such experiences give you hope that when everyone around you tells you the teachers are not motivated, schools don't work for the poor, then you can say that you've seen otherwise.
But I've also had several uncomfortable experiences, frankly. I've been asked in different states, in different villages, I've been asked my caste and why I'm not married—and I was single at that point of time. And now that I am married and I have a child, someone also asked me in the middle of an interview as to why I stopped at one child if I have a girl.

So each experience gives you a small window into the lives of people, into how they think, their aspirations, their motivations, their struggles. And it also collects somewhere in the corner of your brain, and you can pull it out much like an instinct when you're working on the project or when I'm trying to convince a policymaker to adopt a seemingly good program or pitching to a donor to invest in.

Sambhav: Thanks, Shobhini. The story with the teacher and the child in Madhya Pradesh was quite wholesome. And like as a young field researcher myself, I also am regularly in these situations where I get asked questions that I do not expect. So yeah, looking forward to more such experiences. Thank you so much for this conversation. I enjoyed this a lot.

Shobhini Mukerji: You should keep writing your experiences. You'll remember them later.

Sambhav: Thank you, Shobhini. I'll definitely do.
 

This podcast and blog series brings together researchers reflecting on their experiences conducting impact evaluations in India. From working in diverse local contexts to engaging with government and civil society, each episode offers a window into the realities of producing policy-relevant evidence on the ground. 

In this episode of the Researcher Spotlight Series, host Sambhav Choudhury speaks with Ariel Zucker, assistant professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz. Ariel discusses her journey from an early interest in global health disparities to becoming a development economist specializing in experimental approaches. She shares insights from her research on health interventions for diabetes patients and groundwater conservation in India, highlighting how she balances theoretical frameworks with practical field realities to create meaningful, scalable solutions. 

Want to learn more? Explore other podcast episodes in this series where we speak with Sandip Sukhtankar on his research in India, Shobhini Mukerji on her journey into development economics, Harini Kannan on scaling evidence-informed programs with governments, and Gautam Rao on co-producing evidence with policymakers.

[Transcript]

Sambhav: Hi everyone, welcome to an episode of J-PAL South Asia's Researcher Spotlight conversation series. My name is Sambhav Chaudhury, and I'm a research associate at J-PAL South Asia.

Today, I'm in conversation with Ariel Zucker. Ariel is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include improving health and environmental conditions for underserved communities, and she has experience working on projects that focus on countering behavioral biases in personal decision-making. 

Ariel is an outdoorsy person who loves running—in fact, she won 20,000 rupees when she participated in a half marathon in Coimbatore during one of her field visits.

Hi Ariel, thanks for talking to us today.

Ariel: Hi, great to be here!

Sambhav: We would love to begin by asking you—what got you interested in development economics and the experimental approach?

Ariel: Yeah, so I think I love that you asked the question in that order since my interest really came in the order of development, then economics, and then experiments.

I think I decided I wanted to work in development probably in high school. I was really lucky to travel a lot—even before high school and then during high school—to different places, and I met a bunch of people, a lot of them my age, who just had such a different life path. I got particularly interested in development and health at that age because I was meeting people who were my age—15 or 16—who already had HIV, elephantiasis, or TB. I was totally flabbergasted by how different the health outcomes were in different parts of the world.

So I decided to get into development, and especially investing in health in countries where health outcomes were not so great, at a really young age. Then when I got to college, I got excited about economics just because I loved my economics classes, and that motivated me to apply for a PhD in economics. It was really during the application process and then when I went to graduate school that I got excited about experiments.

I love experiments for a lot of reasons, but I think the main reason is that you get to design them yourself. You work with a lot of people—policymakers, NGOs, or other organizations—but you get to think about what you want to do in the future rather than just focusing on what has already happened in the past. I love this natural, forward-looking angle that experiments allow you to take, in contrast to a lot of other methods where you're kind of stuck with what's already been done.

Sambhav: J-PAL's mission is evidence-based policy and decision-making. In this context, could you shed some light on how you balance the theoretical aspects with field realities in South Asia?

Ariel: Yeah, sure. Most of my research tries to put policy first and theory second, just because that's what got me interested and excited about development economics. And second, because it's kind of my comparative advantage—I think some people are more theoretically minded than me.

In a sense, I'm balancing the field realities with the policy impact. Sometimes you're trying to evaluate a policy or a program, but it has a lot of infrastructure necessary to roll it out in the way that you think it should be implemented at scale. It's like you're trying to evaluate a model of the program, and you just make a sort of quick and dirty version.

For example, with my co-authors Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Shilpa Aggarwal, we were really excited about understanding how a policy that incentivized people to hit daily step targets would impact their walking behaviors and their health. We were targeting people with diabetes, and we thought that if this program or policy were ever implemented at scale, there would be some automated system to collect daily walking data—either using a pedometer on their phones or some Wi-Fi hubs where they could automatically sync their pedometers.

But that kind of infrastructure was too expensive for an experiment. So instead, we gave people Fitbits, which have a way to automatically sync and send data back. However, since we were working with people who didn’t have access to Wi-Fi and didn’t set up that infrastructure, we had to adapt. Instead, we had daily phone calls go out to people, and they would self-report how many steps they had taken. That’s what we used to incentivize them, and at the end of the experiment, we went back and verified their step counts to ensure they weren’t cheating.

That is not how we would expect it to happen at scale, but the field realities were that people didn’t have access to Wi-Fi, and we didn’t have enough funding to set up the infrastructure we would need at scale—so we had to adapt to what was already there.

Sambhav: Thanks, Ariel, that was quite insightful. Sometimes, projects don’t align with our initial expectations, but they can still contribute to learnings in that sector. Could you discuss such a project you were a part of and what lessons you learned?

Ariel: Yeah, I'll talk a bit more about the same project where we were incentivizing people to hit step targets.

We wanted to compare incentives for walking to other low-cost programs designed for people with diabetes. We found a promising approach in the literature—an RCT in South India that tested SMS text messages with motivational messages about healthy behaviors, like eating a healthy diet, tailored to the South Indian context.

We expected it to at least work a little, but it didn’t work for us at all. People who got the text messages actually walked less. They didn’t report healthier behaviors, and there were no improved health outcomes like lower blood sugar or weight changes.

The big lesson here is the importance of replication—just because something worked in one context doesn’t mean it will work in another. Publication bias is also a factor—studies that find positive results are more likely to be published, so it’s critical to keep testing and validating findings.

Sambhav: That’s quite insightful and helpful for field researchers. Looking at the broader perspective, how do you see your work affecting policy decisions and improving lives?

Ariel: I really hope to design projects aimed at evaluating programs or policies that could be directly implemented. For example, incentives for walking could be scaled up through government or large health systems in South Asia.

I also have another project on reducing groundwater usage. A lot of farmers in India overuse groundwater and electricity for irrigation because they don’t have to pay directly for the water. We implemented a program where instead of charging farmers for electricity, we paid them to use less. We worked with AKP in Gujarat to implement this model.

So far, it looks like the incentives were effective—farmers did respond by reducing their water use, even with small incentives. Now, we’re working on final outcome data to see whether reducing water use also affects yields or if farmers are just using water more efficiently.

Sambhav: That sounds like a fascinating project! I’m excited to see what the results show. Those were all the questions we had. Thank you so much for your time—this was a really insightful conversation.

Ariel: Thanks, Sambhav! So nice to talk with you.