The purpose of the ASER 2009’s rapid assessment survey in rural areas is twofold: (i) to get reliable estimates of the status of children’s schooling and basic learning (reading and arithmetic level) at the district level; and (ii) to measure the change in these basic learning and...

Using the recent rounds of NSS data, this paper evaluates the performance and outreach of India's public distribution system (PDS) in the rural areas. The results suggest a significant improvement in the performance of PDS in terms of its outreach and offtake. States like Bihar and Jharkhand...

Migration data is matched from the Indian census with climate data to test the hypothesis of climate variability as a push factor for internal migration. The main contribution of the analysis is to introduce relevant meteorological indicators of climate variability, based on the standardized...

The study attempts to empirically examine whether the adoption of organic farming practices leads to better health. As a proxy for health status, a comparison of the health expenditure patterns of organic and conventional rice-farming households in North and Northeast Thailand is done. Using...