Using the nudge theory that involves subtly leading people in desired directions, a study of India’s public policy response to Covid-19 has concluded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nudges were instrumental in creating an effect of herd on lockdown and social distancing rules across the country.
Published in the scientific journal PLOS One, the Cambridge University study used machine learning and artificial intelligence-based algorithms to identify key drivers in policy responses in various government departments to tackle the pandemic, including shutdown.
“India is a vast and diverse country, which was easier for the Western world, where digitization has penetrated to the last mile homes, India is still in the early stages,” said Ronita Bardhan, assistant professor and co-author of the study.
“So these quick nudges were required while simultaneously building the digital backup infrastructure. It was a gigantic task given the transitional state of India, where poverty and affluence coexist ”.
The study noted that the prime minister’s nudges drove preparedness, action and mitigation strategies in the country, adding that his frequent appearance in public was “the most significant factor that generated nudges” to keep a country of 1.3 billion people under strict blocking and social distancing measures. .
Modi’s rigorous media campaigns and public assurances led to the creation of a herd effect in the pharmaceutical, economic, health and public safety sectors that allowed for a strict national lockdown, said the study by Bardhan and the academic. by Gates Cambridge, Ramit Debnath.
“Most of the interventions were aimed at generating internal motivation through the use of triggers that potentially produce long-lasting desired behavior in repeated settings (ie repeated transmission of information through a multimedia channel and involving Bollywood to use songs, poems and dramatizations); also, the use of nostalgia in the form of the television broadcast of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to encourage people to stay at home, ”the authors said.
The study also noted that the successful application of behavioral control measures such as jostling in the public health sector (for example: mandatory use of masks in public spaces; Yoga and Ayurveda to increase immunity), transportation sector (for example: old railroad cars converted into isolation rooms), micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (for example: rapid production of personal protective equipment and masks for frontline workers), science and technology sector (for example: the rapid development of indigenous diagnostic kits, use of robots and nanotechnology to fight infections), home affairs (for example: people who adhere to strict rules of confinement even in situations of great economic difficulty), urban (for example: drones, cartography GIS, crowdsourcing) and education (for example: work from home and online learning).
Primary data for the study was collected from the Press Information Office in the form of press releases of government plans, policies, program initiatives, and achievements. A text corpus of 260,852 words was created from 396 documents.
The authors performed unsupervised machine-based topic modeling using Dirichlet’s latent mapping algorithm in the text corpus to extract high-probability topics across policy sectors.
The issues were then interpreted through a theoretical push lens to derive critical political heuristics from the government, and the results showed that most interventions were aimed at generating endogenous nudge through the use of external triggers.
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