We discuss characteristics of the spatial distribution of poverty and calorie and protein deficiency in India. Two units of analysis are considered - states and NSS-defined agro-climatic zones. The data used are the NSS Expenditure Surveys of the 43rd, 50th and 55th rounds. Results on stochastic...

The contribution of the present paper is threefold. First, we formally test whether the effect of calorie deprivation on wages is more significant/higher for the lower quantiles of workers. In the extant literature this is established through non-linear terms in the wage equation. A more...

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...

We test for the existence of a Poverty Nutrition Trap (PNT) in the case of calories and four important micronutrients — carotene, iron, riboflavin, and thiamine- for three categories of wages: sowing, harvesting, and other for male and female workers separately. We use household level national...

This paper tests for the existence of a Poverty Nutrition Trap (PNT) in the case of the nutrient most likely to have productivity impacts, i.e., calories, for three categories of wages – sowing, harvesting, and other – and for male and female workers separately. We use household level...

This paper analyses the effects of access to Rural Public Works (RPW) and Public Distribution System (PDS), a public food subsidy programme, on consumption poverty, vulnerability and undernutrition in India drawing upon the large household data sets constructed by National Sample Survey (NSS)...

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...

This paper reports on mean consumption, poverty (all three FGT measures) and inequality during January to June 2004 for rural India using National sample Survey (NSS) data for the 60th Round. Mean consumption at the national level is much higher than the poverty line. However, the Gini...

In this paper we compute nutrient-expenditure elasticities for two macro nutrients (calories and protein) and five micro nutrients (calcium, thiamine, riboflavin, calcium and iron) using an all India sample of rural households for 1994. We show that in each case the respective elasticities are...

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...