The object of this essay is to describe and analyse contractual relations in two villages in North-east Bihar at a time when the so-called ‘green revolution’ promised much and the region had just started to benefit from canal irrigation. It is against this historical background that I will...

The present study contributes to the limited literature on the interlinkage between household non-farm diversification, agricultural feminization and female autonomy in farming. The study uses unit level data from the India Human Development Survey for the years 2004-05 and 2011-12. The paper...

This note shows that in a developing economy, agriculture and Special Economic Zones (SEZ) can grow simultaneously without affecting one another if an appropriate subsidy policy is designed by the government. We consider increasing returns brought about by external economies of scale in the...

Does existing inequality hinder redistributive policies that aim to help the poor? This paper answers this question under a widely used redistributive policy in developing countries--public works schemes. Using district-level data on land ownership distributions and the implementations of the...

India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the world's largest public works program, has been demonstrated to have beneficial impacts on a wide range of outcomes, but its effects on agricultural productivity have been relatively understudied (Sukhtankar, 2017). We test whether...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

“Farmers in India born in debt growing in debt and dieing in debt” -Gurnal MirdhalThe above quotation is a mirror image of Indian farmers economic condition. The famous quotation was coined by Gurnal Mirdhal, a great economist, in his famous book 'Asian Drama', for decades before. From...