Poverty, particularly rural poverty, has been one of the enduring policy challenges in India. Surely the most important objective of the reforms process would have been to make a significant dent on rural poverty. It is from this that a program of accelerated growth must draw its rationale. In...

This paper analyses the effects of access to Rural Public Works (RPW) and the Public Distribution System (PDS), a public food subsidy programme, on consumption poverty, vulnerability and undernutrition in India drawing, on the large household datasets constructed with National Sample Survey...

The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) have documented the evolution of the village economy over this period in an exhaustive study entitled How Lives Change: Palanpur, India and...

Conventional approaches to the measurement of income-poverty require the ability to identify the poor by reference to a specified poverty line. On the face of it, it may appear to be unproblematic to specify such a poverty line. There are, however, analytical and conceptual difficulties entailed...

Female labor force participation increased worldwide between 1990 and 2015. In India, it decreased 22% from a low rate of 37%. Rural married women drove the decrease, which began right after the implementation of a policy guaranteeing employment for rural households. I document the following....

We use 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states spanning 1960?1994 to study how the sectoral composition of economic growth and initial conditions interact to influence how much growth reduced consumption poverty. The elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development...

I investigate the intra-household labor and resource allocation consequences of an employment guarantee targeting rural households in India. The guarantee insures household earnings, replacing women as added workers and shutting down a motive for saving. Despite sizable program-job take-up, the...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the inter-state and inter-regional disparities in poverty incidence and levels of living in the rural and urban sectors of India. In this paper, we propose to analyse regional disparities using a more disaggregated data. It is known that there are...

This paper reviews status of public distribution system and its relationship with the problem of food security and poverty incidence among the north-eastern states of India. Poverty indices for all the states in the NE region are calculated. It appears that the PDS is widely accessible to the...

Survey-based welfare indicators can fluctuate over time in ways which have little to do with macroeconomic changes in the economy. So basing policy decisions on short-term movements in such welfare indicators can be hazardous. There was a sharp increase in India's poverty measures in the...