LUCKNOW, Feb. 3 -- Nobel Laureate and economist Prof Abhijit Banerjee on Monday said that the solution to a complex problem like poverty comes from ground-level experiments and micro-level policy reforms. Delivering a lecture at the Lucknow University at an event organised as part of the Sanatkada Lucknow Festival, Prof Banerjee dwelt on five pillars that determine the parameters of poverty: nutrition, microcredit, poverty traps, education system failure and the power of small things. His address focused on the second edition of the book, "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty" that he co-authored with French-American economist Esther Duflo. "When we began working on the book related to poverty, we believed that providing free food or increased income won't help with the problem of poverty but we were wrong. In large scale field experiments, we found that income increases consumption and in fact giving people money helps in changing their nutrition as they get optimistic," Banerjee said. He highlighted that the non-availability of credit often traps people in poverty. "Programmes that focus on the transfer of productive assets combined with technical training could move households from poverty to self-employment. This approach was applied by BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) which proved to lend a big push to the ultra-poor from poverty trap," he added. "Besides, although microfinance institutions have expanded rapidly over the last 10 to 15 years, they still remain out of reach of many people and only top 5% are able to gain from it. Microfinance leads some of the beneficiaries to expand their businesses, it does not appear to fuel an escape from poverty based on those small businesses," Banerjee said. He said even though children have access to teachers, school buildings but the schools are working as per a particular pedagogy which does not identify the talent of a child. "If a child cannot read, the teacher must teach them to read. We found out through certain experiments that children in 8-12 age group could do market mathematics instantly but when given a mathematics test, they did miserably and when the experiment was done among school-going children, their performance was completely opposite. We are teaching children to take tests but not to do mathematics," he added. So, rigid pedagogy, which does not focus on how and what a child wants to do things, is also a problem, said Banerjee who won the Nobel Prize for Economic in 2019 along with his two co-researchers Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty"....