just got a boost with the award of the Sveriges Riksbank Prizein Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to three economists who haveworked, and are still working, to understand and alleviate poverty Abhijit Banerjee andEsther Duflo of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michael Kremer of HarvardUniversity. This is only the second time a woman has bagged the prestigious award,popularly called the Economics Nobel, and it is a first for a husband-wife duo to win inthis discipline Mr. Banerjee is married to Ms. Duflo. In the words of the Royal SwedishAcademy of Sciences, the experiment-based approach of the three laureates hastransformed development economics and turned it into a flourishing field of research.One of their studies resulted in benefiting 5 million children in India throughprogrammes of remedial tutoring in schools. The three adopted an evidence-basedapproach to apply theory to real-life situations using randomised trials and assessingthe outcomes. The effort was to understand the impact of interventions to achievedesirable outcomes. The approach is derived from the concept of clinical trials in thepharmaceuticals industry. If this sounds like gobbledygook, the experiment that Mr. Banerjee and Ms. Duflocarried out in Rajasthan some years ago would explain the concept better. Despiteimmunisation being free, women were not bringing in their children for the vaccinationshot. The two MIT economists decided to give a bag of pulses free to women whobrought their babies for vaccination. Word soon spread and the rate of immunisationshot up in the region. Another experiment they did was in Mumbai and Vadodara tounderstand learning outcomes in the field of education. Was it lack of access totextbooks or hunger that caused poor learning outcomes? Through field studies, Mr.Banerjee and Ms. Duflo established that the problem is that teaching is not adapted tothe needs of the students. Learning outcomes improved in schools that were providedwith teaching assistants to support students with special needs. The importance of thework being done by the three laureates cannot be overemphasised. Governmentsacross the world, including in India, spend big money on social schemes without thevaguest of ideas on whether their objectives have been met. The field-work basedapproach that these economists have perfected has revolutionised the field ofdevelopment economics and made it more relevant in policy making. The governmentwould do well to borrow from the research of these laureates to understand the impactof its several schemes, and where necessary, tweak them to derive maximum benefitfor the thousands of crores of rupees that it spends.