VENICE, A fairy tale in which a mute cleaner in a government laboratory falls in love with an aquatic creature facing dissection there - an appeal to embrace differences - premiered at the Venice film festival on Thursday.

Rohini Pande, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Director of Evidence for Policy Design, is reputed for her pioneering research into economic costs and benefits of informal and formal institutions in the developing world and the role of public policy in affecting change. Michael Callen, who is an assistant professor at University of California San Diego, specializes in political economy, development economics and experimental economics. The two were recently in Kathmandu to train senior government bureaucrats on designing evidence-based policies. So how does Nepal benefit from such evidence-based policy-making? And what can it learn from other countries? Biswas Baral and Mahabir Paudyal caught up with the two while they were in the capital.