Researcher uses cricket tournaments to explore caste interactions in rural India

An hour outside of Varanasi, India, the Ganjari village cricket ground is hot and dusty. Birds pick at a cow carcass beside the road, and a stand further down sells samosas. Players arrive on motorbikes, and the men cluster in teams of five around MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) surveyors, who enter details like the captain's name and the batting order into tablets. It's a friendly Saturday cricket match—and also a development economics experiment in mediating caste inter