Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and...

This paper assembles data at the all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and...

In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural household member who wants such work at the...

India's 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated...

The authors analyze five rounds of National Sample Survey data covering 1983, 1987/8, 1993/4, 1999/0, and 2004/5 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty. Poverty in rural India declined at a modest rate during this period. The authors provide region-level estimates...

Minimum wages are generally thought to be unenforceable in developing rural economies. But there is one solution - a workfare scheme in which the government acts as the employer of last resort. Is this a cost-effective policy against poverty? Using a microeconometric model of the casual labor...

Evidence from Pakistan's Punjab indicates that monopoly power in the market for groundwater (irrigation water extracted using private tubewells) results in a substantial resource misallocation. But despite this substantial misallocation of groundwater, a welfare analysis shows that monopoly...

In assessing new technologies, policy-makers should allow time between the adoption of the technologies and the realization of productivity gains attributable to them. Productivity growth was much lower than might be expected during the green revolution in the Indian Punjab but improved as...

This article attempts to determine the long-term productivity and sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs by measuring trends in total factor productivity for production systems in both states since the advent of the Green Revolution. These measurements over...

The authors analyze five rounds of National Sample Survey data covering 1983, 1987/8, 1993/4, 1999/0, and 2004/5 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty. Poverty in rural India declined at a modest rate during this period. The authors provide region-level estimates...