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Publications (12)
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Theory and some evidence from India
Using the lens of a life-cycle model, we argue that an administrative failure of a wage payment delay in a workfare programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two channels. First, it imposes an implicit consumption tax on the household. Second, it changes the status of labour...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Experimental evidence from an information dissemination intervention
This study assesses the impact of an information dissemination intervention on the local-level implementation of the rural public works program in India. One key feature of the intervention is to provide information to workers once their wages get credited into their accounts. Using administrative...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
Working Paper
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– An investigation of India’s employment guarantee programme
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a life cycle...
Working Paper
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– Theory and evidence from India
What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India
In emerging economies, pro-social policy outcomes may be prevented by bureaucratic inefficiency, capture by elected or non-elected office holders, or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failures often prevails. We study the pro-sociality of politicians’...
Working Paper
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– Lessons from the Right to Food Movement in India
In April 2001 the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court of India arguing that the government has a duty to provide greater relief in the context of mass hunger. The litigation has now become the best known precedent on the right to food internationally. This paper...
Working Paper
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– Bottlenecks in Delivering the Expected Outcome
Over the past decade, a series of events in India have brought the question of food security into sharp focus. Vast famine-affected areas versus surplus production and stocks of grains, the impact of globalization and World Trade Organization laws on agriculture and farmers, the media’s spotlight on...
Working Paper
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– India under Current Compulsions
Food insecurity at the household level has become unacceptable in India where the economy is growing at high rates and food sufficiency is already achieved at the macro-level. Food security has always been an important issue in the Indian political economy and was addressed by numerous poverty...
Working Paper
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– A Comparative Analysis across Regions
This study analyses the changes in prevalence of undernutrition between the 1980s and 1990s at the national and sub-national levels in India and focuses on the rural-urban comparisons. The study exploits the demographic information available in household surveys to derive a household-specific norm...
Working Paper
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– A Comparison of the Experiences of India and China
A comparative study of the public distribution systems of foodgrains in India and China is expected to reveal lessons and experiences that are valuable to policymakers. This is particularly important for developing countries in their endeavour to ensure food security. This paper undertakes such an...
Working Paper
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– The Experience of India, a Large Populated Country
India accounts for 16.7 per cent of the world’s food consumers. With the exception of China, India’s size in terms of food consumers is many times larger than the average size of the rest of the countries. At the time of independence in 1947, India was in the grip of a serious food crisis, which was...
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