India's approach to social security stresses the provision of subsidized food and public works. Targeted, unconditional cash transfers are little used, and have been little evaluated. An evaluation of cash transfers for the elderly and widows based on national household survey data and surveys...

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...

Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty than even poorly-targeted options, given hidden costs...

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...

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...

We analyze five rounds of National Sample Survey data covering 1983, 1987/1988, 1993/1994, 1999/2000, and 2004/2005 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty. Poverty in rural India has declined at a modest rate during this time period. We provide region-level...