Delighted & overwhelmed to win the @crossword_book Award 2024 for "Accelerating India’s Development" I am deeply grateful to the many readers who have engaged with the book and its ideas, and hope that this lovely citation by the award jury encourages many more to do so!

Deeply honored and grateful to have won the 2025 @GajaCapital book prize, and to the jury award letter for noting that: "We are confident that your book will inspire millions just as it inspired us" Holiday reading recommendation! @PenguinIndia https://t.co/LPA8wEzrx9

“The benchmarks set in Vision 2047 will not only elevate Telangana but also contribute to elevating India as a whole. Telangana’s initiatives in good governance continue to inspire national practice. My team at CEGIS and I are committed to supporting the State and are grateful to

🚨 Job alert: I’m hiring a postdoc in Stockholm to work with me, @marome1 @karthik_econ on edu policy in India Flexible duration: 1 yr (if you have an AP job lined up) or 2 yr. The aim is to coauthor high quality papers. https://t.co/2SMPvhKxRX More details below ⬇️ (1/4)

Pertinent to revisit one of the most seminal applied econ papers, I have read by @Prof_Nishith_P , @karthik_econ https://t.co/1TYjbJdI13

Our favorite piping hot hosting hack (literally) ♨️

We are pleased to announce that Karthik Muralidharan (@karthik_econ), Tata Chancellor's Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego, will deliver the keynote address at the ISB Insights Forum 2025, being held on November 21 at our Mohali campus. Launched in 2023,

Lucid, incisive look at our welfare spends by Prof @karthik_econ TLDR: - you can put welfare spends into a 2x2 matrix of equity and efficiency. - The worst programmes like free electricity to farmers benefit rich farmers who overuse it for water-intensive crops leading to

The same welfare budget can deliver much greater effective welfare if we shrink programs that hurt both equity and efficiency, and expand spending on programs that promote both. Read more in my @timesofindia op-ed today: https://t.co/HjWEg6KAbc

For folks in the New York area: I will be giving a book talk @Columbia on Tuesday, 14 Oct from 5:30-7pm hosted by the @raj_center The talk is open to the public, but registration is required for building access: https://t.co/LS14uPnGZW See you there!

"An important new paper by @singhabhi @marome1 & @pt_berg shows that private pre-schools in India are MUCH more effective (~0.59-0.74SD) than government-run ones. These differences explain around 60% of the SES gap in education outcomes at the start of primary school!"

How did illegal vapes from China flood our neighborhoods and schools?

The @MittalInstitute also did an interview as a preview to the talk that may be of interest to attendees: https://t.co/XWYPSUpW0K

For folks in the Boston area: I will be giving a book talk at @Harvard on Thursday, 9 October: hosted by @MittalInstitute @HarvardCID @aikhwaja moderated by @TarunKhannaHBS The talk is open to the public, but registration is required: https://t.co/Gjns1rvlaO See you there!

Big picture: `science of scaling’ matters enormously for welfare. Unlike medicine, social programs need iterative adaptation & testing beyond finding "what works" in small pilots. Without this, as @Econ_4_Everyone notes, “we are performing efficacy tests on steroids”. 16/16"

These results also matter for rich countries. High-dosage tutoring has been found to be very effective but has been hard to scale since good tutors are scarce, and costly. PAL could make personalized tutoring feasible at scale. 15/16

These results matter beyond India. Most LMICs face a “learning crisis”, and have large numbers of students below grade-level standards. Middle-school years are especially challenging with few evidence-backed scalable ideas. Our results offer a promising way forward. 14/16

Implementation protocols developed/tested in this study have *already* informed policy at scale (+ other EdTech initiatives). Mindspark is now operational in over 2200 public schools in 13 Indian states covering >260k students. Further scale-ups currently in the works. 13/16

Why is this a big deal? Governments spend billions on hardware, but evidence shows hardware alone ≠ learning. What matters is thoughtful integration of PAL software into classrooms. Our study shows how to make EdTech actually work in public schools. 12/16

A key result is that the "dose-response" relationship between time spent on the platform and learning gains is linear and constant over time. Thus, monitoring usage is a low-cost way to track and improve implementation quality at scale 11/16

One disappointment: we find no gains on school exams. Students were so far behind that even large gains didn’t show up on grade-level tests. Highlights trade-off between teaching “at the right level” vs “at the curricular level,” and the value of early remediation. 10/16

This model was 2x as cost-effective as the original study because: (a) hardware was used more intensely, and (b) many inputs were already present in schools Program was 1.5 to 4x more cost-effective than default spending patterns. Costs should reduce further over time. 9/16