Govt intervention needed for specific progs: Nobel laureate
Times of India | 9 July 2024
Kolkata: Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, who preferred cash grants over food aid to people, said there are many things that cannot be delivered by the govt. However, he felt that there are areas like vaccination in which the govt needs to intervene with specific programmes.
“For most purposes, the trouble of getting goods to people is not worth it.There are cases where people don’t want what we want them to have,” he said at an interactive session at Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Kolkata on Monday.
According to Banerjee, we are “often worried that poor are irresponsible. We think that if we don’t give them daily goods they will spend the money on something that they don’t need”. He cited examples of large scale experiments where some groups were randomly chosen to get cash and others were given equivalent in some form like food. “It is found that it made no difference to their consumption,” he said.
However, Banerjee pointed at the need for specific govt intervention, and not cash grants, in cases like vaccination. “In the US, during Covid, many people were not getting the vaccination. These are the situations where the govt needs to step in and encourage people,” he said.
Nobel laureate Esther Dufflo, who was also present at the interaction, stressed the need to find a balance between good quality medical infrastructure and paying for health through health insurance. “One way is to provide high quality medical infrastructure and the other way is to pay for their health through health insurance. Health insurance does not cover a lot of things and people don’t fully understand how it works. We need to work on how to balance the two systems for free delivery of good quality of healthcare,” she said.