Despite its evident importance relatively little is known about links between Body Mass Index (BMI) and participation in workfare programs, particularly in India. Using a unique data set for the Indian state of Rajasthan for 2009-10, this paper attempts to fill this void and examines the...

India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has been hailed as one of the country's most creative social initiatives. Since the program was begun only recently (in 2004-05) there is a need to assess its impact on households not just in one year but over time. To the best of our...

The Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) — the largest food subsidy programme in India — has been a dismal failure in targeting the poor. The present paper examines its performance in three Indian states — Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, based on primary data collected for...

This paper focuses on the targeting accuracy of NREG in two Indian states, Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Tamil Nadu (TN), based on household data for 2008–09. In order to overcome the difficulties arising from the use of a headcount index and a specific poverty threshold, stochastic dominance tests...

Evidence on the association between traditional poverty measures and health is widely available in the literature. However, the traditional ex-post poverty measures neglect many aspects of household welfare by overlooking the risk that a household faces in view of fewer resources available to...

ndia's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has been hailed as one of the country's most creative social initiatives. Since the program was begun only recently (in 2004-05) there is a need to assess household access to this program and persistence of benefits to households not just...

The workfare scheme the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the direct food subsidy program the Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TPDS) represent two alternative social safety nets instituted in India as anti-poverty measures. This paper examines whether from the point of...

The objective of this analysis is mainly to construct an intuitive measure of the performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India -a nation-wide poverty alleviation programme which was introduced in 2005. The focus is on excess demand at the district level. Some...

Despite accelerated growth there is pervasive hunger, child undernutrition and mortality. Our analysis focuses on their determinants. Raising living standards alone will not reduce hunger and undernutrition. Reduction of rural/urban disparities, income inequality, consumer price stabilisation,...

Employment elasticity with respect to agriculture value added in South Asia has weakened in recent years. While crop diversification has grown and value added per hectare also grew, employment growth was sluggish. However, the linkages between farm and non-farm employment remain strong. Drawing...