Rural development policy addresses the welfare of rural households and communities. With a majority of the world's poor located in rural areas, the resilience of rural poverty in industrialized countries, and a significant share of environmental degradation the byproduct of rural poverty, the...

Agriculture and rural development are the foremost priorities before Indian government. A large number of policies have been announced in the recent past. This paper looks at the role of FPO in sustainable development through transformation of agriculture and rural sector in India

One of the most disappointing features of the Ninth Plan was the declaration in agricultural growth, which set in after the mid 1990's with GDP in agricultural growing at only around 2 per cent per annum after growing at 3.6 per cent per annum 6th 1980 and 1996.Reserving these declaration to...

Over the past sixty years, most Asian countries have undergone relatively rapid agricultural transformations that helped jumpstart broader economic development. However, the changes have differed markedly in nature and speed across countries of the region. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the...

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion on the working of village forest institutions (VFI) in developing countries with a view to understanding their role as rural institutions. In a tropical country like India, the success of any community based forest management effort...

Productivity varies greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood. Using a unique Indian household survey, we estimate peer effects on agricultural revenue. Results show that 60% of farmers' revenue is explained by peers. Input expenditures and land allocation to...

Trust and participation in social networks are inherently interrelated. We make use of India's demonetization policy, an unexpected and unforeseeable exogenous variation, to causally identify the effect of social networks in determining trust. We use first-hand quantitative and qualitative data...

This paper studies what can be learned from pairwise stable networks. I specify the marginal utility of a pair forming a link as a function of individual-level unobserved heterogeneity as well as pair level observed characteristics. I derive a tetrad-level utility inequality from pairwise...

Trust and participation in social networks are inherently interrelated. We make use of India's demonetization policy, an unexpected and unforeseeable exogenous variation, to causally identify the effect of social networks in determining trust. We use first-hand quantitative and qualitative data...