In the world of environmental activism Mark Lynas was god.An ardent and sometimes militant opponent of genetically modified (GM) crops,he nuked the movement he had once nurtured by doing a volte face at aconference in Oxford. “The GM debate is over… You are more likely to get hit byan asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have diedfrom choosing organic, but no one has died from eating GM,” proclaimed Lynas.
But lost in the global accusations of Lynas selling his soulto the powerful multinational corporations is an uncomfortable Indian truththat he let loose during his long speech. In a scalding criticism of Indianenvironmental activism he said it was based on “widely believed myths, popularmisconceptions and conspiracy theorists”. To be fair to the likes of VandanaShiva, Sunita Narain and RK Pachauri, the environmental activism practised bythis school is largely based on facts and research. Lynas’ real targets wereunintended. He actually held a mirror to other sundry Indian activists, fromthose supposedly promoting something as amorphous as Indian cultural values tosomething as specific as pre-natal healthcare.
If Lynas is pointing out the elephants in the room,economist Esther Duflo is the one clearly and loudly saying that there is noplace for them in the field of development activism.
Duflo, co-author of the ground-breaking ‘Poor Economics’ andco-founder and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, foundthat after 40 years and over $3.04 billion development aid in Africa, nobodyknew what that huge amount of money had achieved for the poor people of thecontinent. While the amount of aid given to African countries in the last fourdecades exponentially shot up, the per capita GDP actually sunk way below the1970 levels.
Duflo’s findings strike at the very heart of the currentlogic of development activism that advocates that pumping in more money willeventually empower the poor. Her answer is quite simple. Duflo suggests thatbenefits of development must be evaluated by randomised impact evaluations.Pharmaceutical companies have been using such techniques for decades. In suchan evaluation a large number of people are randomly divided into two groups –one gets the drug and the other does not. Such a random selection filterssub-conscious biases and statistical anomalies leading to a determination ofcorrelation and the cause of an effect. Such an approach has the potential tounveil the cloak of non-accountability that has come to define developmentactivism today.
Duflo’s unique methodology helped two projects on education– one in Kenya and the other in India – unravel the real reasons behind theproblems of lack of attendance of children and teachers. Activists have alwayspointed out different reasons, from lack of roads to too shiny blackboards, forthese two problems. None of these reasons, one must admit in hindsight, werearrived at after some in-depth research. In Kenya, Duflo’s team through theirintensive randomised impact evaluations found that children did not attendschool regularly because they suffered from stomach worms. All it took was around of de-worming medicines to increase attendance by over 25%. In India, theteam figured the best way to make teachers attend was to give cheap cameras tothe children. Only those teachers who could produce photographic evidencereceived salary.
Lynas and Duflo are both, in their own ways, questioning thecomfortable existence of activists who are divorced from data and high-qualityresearch. If the likes of Lynas and Duflo can give well-established activistsin the developed world, who are still steeped in the culture of research anddata, sleepless nights, the Indian activists no doubt find them a threat totheir very existence.
They are essentially saying that thorough research andimpeccable data should be the bedrock of all evaluations and decisions. Amajority of the Indian activists neither understand the research process, nordo they want to, and find data-driven approaches ‘tiresome and time-consuming’.To be fair, some are genuinely concerned about their areas and want to improvetheir ability to impact a particular situation. But they are not able to do sobecause of their lack of training in the right research tools, methodology anddata interpretation.
Swaminathan is a senior fellow at the Observer ResearchFoundation
