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...

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...

Several tests of targeting accuracy of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREG) focusing on shares of participants by poverty status, their duration of participation, and earnings from it are used. The analysis is based on primary household data collected from three India states,...

The impact of information on corruption and effective implementation is Janus faced. In this paper we use household level data to address the issue of corruption in the NREG program in three states: Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. We discover that at the entry level, information about...

This paper, a sequel to our earlier paper on Rajasthan, presents results on the participation of rural workers in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme based on a pilot survey of three villages in the Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh, India. These villages are Kaligiri, Obulayyapale...

This paper presents results on the participation of rural workers in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program based on a pilot survey of three villages in Udaipur district, Rajasthan, India. Three villages (Dhundiya, Karanpur and Prithvisingh Ji Ka Khera) were covered. Total number of...

Using pooled household level data for the Indian states of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh we find that the size of landholdings is a negative predictor of participation in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (NREGP). In state level analysis this pattern survives in Rajasthan but...

Governments struggle with the reality that the beneficiaries of anti-poverty programs are powerless to influence policies and stem the possibility of capture of benefits by the nonpoor. Networks – social and political – are supposed to increase the ability of the lesspowerful to access their...

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...