Supporting the poor but skilled artisans by making assets available to them: an empirical investigation in rural India

Large amounts of investments are made by developing countries in designing and implementing poverty alleviation programmes. Many of such programmes are also targeted at well defined beneficiaries. This paper attempts to analyse if some segments of beneficiaries are more likely to benefit from these programmes vis-à-vis other beneficiaries. From an econometric analysis of primary data collected from the SITRA programme in India it was found that the socially and economically disadvantaged sections of beneficiaries were more likely to have benefited from the programme, under which improved toolkits were provided to poor rural artisans at ninety per cent subsidy. The conclusions have important policy implications as they lead to possible win-win situations as narrower targeting of the same poverty alleviation programme on more disadvantaged sections could achieve higher growth as well as greater reduction of poverty. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.