The National Health Insurance Scheme (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, RSBY) aims to improve poor people’s access to quality health care in India. This paper looks at the implementation of the scheme in Karnataka, drawing on a large survey of eligible households and interviews with empanelled...

Do the short and medium term adjustment costs associated with trade liberalization influence schooling and child labor decisions? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. Overall, in the 1990s, rural India experienced a dramatic increase in schooling and decline in...

The Government of India is implementing a new policy which dramatically increases funding for a cash transfer program targeted to the poor elderly. The expansion of this 'social pension' in terms of coverage and benefit levels is taking place with little understanding of poverty among India's...

Financial inclusion is the broad based delivery of banking and other financial services at affordable cost to the poorest sections of society. In India, financial inclusion emphasizes to include maximum number of people under formal financial systems. The most important part of financial...

The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) has been widely used to analyze climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. The storylines behind these scenarios outline alternative development pathways, which have been the base for climate research and other studies at global,...

This paper analyzes the determinants of rural poverty in India, contrasting the situation of the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Schedule Tribe (ST) households with the non-scheduled population. The incidence of poverty among SC and ST households is significantly higher than non-scheduled households....

Though in decline, tank irrigation is still an important characteristic of rural social life in many parts of South India. It is of particular importance to the poor being dependent on agriculture, while rich landowners increasingly concentrate their investments and income on non-rural...

The construction of large dams is one of the most costly and controversial forms of public infrastructure investment in developing countries, but little is known about their impact. This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large dams in India. To account for endogenous...

Community based health insurance (CBHI) is more suited than alternate arrangements to providing health insurance to the low-income people living in developing countries. The universal health insurance scheme, launched recently by the Prime Minister of India, is only one of the forms that CBHI...