State police officer recalls her association with Nobel laureates
RAJASTHAN CONNECT IPS officer Nina Singh says Banerjee and Duflo humble, dedicated
JAIPUR: This year’s Nobel prize winners for economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have a Rajasthan connect – they have worked with Rajasthan cadre IPS officer Nina Singh on police reforms.
Singh, who is currently ADG, Community Policing, recalls that she came in contact with Duflo when she was pursuing her Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard. “Both Abhijit and Esther are very nice. They are humble and simple people, extremely dedicated to their work,” Singh recalled.
“Working on a project different from your core work is not easy. They work on poverty alleviation and development economics but they took up this project on police reforms enthusiastically,” she added.
Singh said they were driven by the idea that policing must be improved so that it becomes a professional force and caters to the needs of citizens.
“Our concern was that even a poor person who loses Rs 10, which for her is a big sum, should be properly attended to and the police should be sensitized to this,” said Singh.
Singh returned to Rajasthan in 2004 and was keen to work on police reforms and discussed her idea with Duflo who showed interest.
Together they conceived of a project to check efficacy of police reforms on the ground. Singh says that the then DGP AS Gill was very encouraging and forthcoming and made the project possible.
So, MIT and Rajasthan Police collaborated on the project that was implemented in 162 police stations between 2005 and 2009. The funding was done by the MIT.
“We decided to test four interventions suggested by police reform panels – curbing transfers, rotation of duty and weekly offs, training in soft-skills and community involvement,“ Singh said.
Randomised controlled trials were conducted in the 162 police stations. One set of police stations were selected as the control group which functioned as usual and the other was the treatment group where the interventions were implemented, she said.
She said a fifth intervention of the trials was decoys which they realised are very effective in policing.
The most impactful interventions were training of the police in soft-skills to improve their behavior towards the public and the decoys, she added. “This was the first time that interventions were tested on the ground and data was generated,” she further added.
Singh later also collaborated with Banerjee and Duflo for another project on curbing drunken driving. For this 182 police stations were selected, one was the control group and the other was the treatment group.
Along with the usual checkpints, surprise check-points were also set up to curb drunken driving. It was found that surprise check-points were helpful in reducing deaths by 25 percent and accidents by 17 percent, said Singh.
“Commuters were aware of the fixed check-points and would take a different route to avoid them but with the surprise check-points, they were caught off guard,” she said.
The data collected from the two experiments formed the base for two research papers published by Duflo, Banerjee and Si ngh i n t he National Bureau of Economic Research in 2019 and in the MIT’S Poverty Action Lab website.
Singh, who is known as an honest and courageous officer, is the first ADG from Rajasthan to have been awarded the President’s Medal.
Her husband Rohit Singh is a senior bureaucrat in the Rajasthan government.