This note examines costs and returns from the cultivation of different types of cotton in a rainfed village in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India. While the pros and cons of GM cotton are extensively debated, there are only a few empirical studies on the economic performance of Bt cotton,...

The right to adequate housing is recognised as a basic human right by the United Nations and its constituent bodies. Although India is a signatory to many international covenants in this regard, it has neither a rural housing policy nor mechanisms to monitor the realisation of the right to...

Given the relatively limited employment opportunities available within villages, the main vehicle for intergenerational occupational mobility for people in rural India is migration to urban or semi-urban areas. At the same time, since 69 per cent of India's population still lives in villages, it...

Evidence on calorie intake and nutritional outcomes establishes that chronic hunger and food insecurity persist today on a mass scale in India. The liberalization-induced policy of narrow targeting of the Public Distribution System (PDS), a programme of food security that provides a minimum...

This note examines costs and returns from the cultivation of different types of cotton in a rainfed village in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India. While the pros and cons of GM cotton are extensively debated, there are only a few empirical studies on the economic performance of Bt cotton,...

There is a mis­con­cep­tion in the lit­er­a­ture that in­come dis­tri­b­u­tion in India is less un­equal than, for in­stance, in China or the coun­tries of Latin Amer­ica. This mis­con­cep­tion is based on a com­par­i­son of like...

In this paper, we examine inequality in incomes between households of different castes in rural India, using a unique dataset comprising household data from a cross-section of eight villages across four States. The focus of this paper is on Dalit or Scheduled Caste households. We begin with very...