What are Randomised Control Trials?

♤ RCTs break larger questions about policy interventions into smaller, easier to test studies.

♤ For example, the big questions like ‘poverty’ are broken down into its various dimensions

like- poor health, inadequate education, etc.

♤ Within poor health, they look at nutrition, provisioning of medicines, and vaccination, etc. Within vaccinations, they try to conduct various experiments and, based on such “evidence”, decide what needs to be done.

♤ This is extremely relevant when it comes to framing policy in low- and middle-income countries, where state capacity is quite limited and it is particularly necessary to be able to prioritise more effective policies over less.