In this report, ESCAP explores the future of urbanization in Asia and the Pacific, focusing on the dynamic shifts in the region’s urban landscape. It highlights the region’s demographic transformations, including population ageing, and the persistent challenges of urban poverty and inequality. The analysis covers urban areas of all sizes, …
This paper aims to understand the implications of implementing the Saxena Committee’s recommendations in respect of identifying the poor in India. Relative to the one currently in use, the application of the proposed methodology appears to be more beneficial in general to social groups such as scheduled tribes, most backward …
BHAWANIPATNA: The benefits under the Rashtriya Suraksha Bima Yojana (RSBY) have failed to trickle down to the beneficiaries the Below Poverty Line (BPL) families. Though launched as a pilot project in Kalahandi in November 2009, poor management and lack of awareness among the BPL beneficiaries have marred the cashless treatment …
The World Bank has asked policymakers in India to stop neglecting urban poverty and expand the scope of some rural flagship schemes to urban areas. It has called for a shift in focus in policy to address poverty as demographic changes and intense migration have dampened poverty reduction rates in …
Order of the Supreme Court of India in the matter of Centre for Environment & Food Security Vs Union of India & Others dated 12/05/2011 regarding proper implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 and the schemes framed thereunder. Supreme Court directs all the State Governments …
Aadhaar has started yielding results. Maheswaram, in Ranga Reddy district, is the first mandal to issue ration through the public distribution system (PDS) based on Aadhaar-type smart cards with biometric authentication. This process saves about 20 per cent of ration. Confirms Mr K.R.B.H.N. Chakravarthi, director, civil supplies department, “We are …
A survey by the Indian government in 2002 to determine households below poverty line (BPL) left out many poor families. Nearly a decade later, the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MORD) is trying to set the wrong right. But it is unable to decide on the criteria for identifying poor …
This paper uses findings from 293 life-history interviews, conducted by the author and a small team of researchers in rural Bangladesh in 2007, to examine what can be learned about patterns of exit from poverty. The author argues that narrative-based studies of how individuals move out of, or into poverty …
A survey by the Indian government in 2002 to determine households below poverty line (BPL) left out many poor families. Nearly a decade later, the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MORD) is trying to set the wrong right. But it is unable to decide on the criteria for identifying poor …
The livelihood options of landless households of far western Nepal are wage labor, farming and seasonal migration to India. Food sufficiency is barely enough for 0-3 months a year for most. When food is scarce, they cope by borrowing money, buying food, occasional wager labor as domestic servants, less popular …
The poverty status of all 4,198 households resident in 18 villages of Rajasthan, India, was examined at four points of time between 1977 and 2010 using a retrospective methodology known as Stages of Progress. Households that were consistently poor at all four points spanning a period of 33 years were …
There is a good deal of ill-informed enthusiasm about “conditional cash transfers” (CCT) among Indian policy makers, based on a superficial understanding of the Latin American experience. In Mexico, Brazil, and other pioneers of this approach, conditional cash transfers were developed to bring a fringe of poor households into the …
The manner in which rights at work have been identified and articulated within both the International Labour Organisation and India since the founding of the agency in 1919, bears a close similarity. Despite what its mandate would suggest, the ilo (like India) has chosen to treat only certain selected rights …
The IFAD study, “Agriculture – Pathways to Prosperity in Asia and the Pacific”, provides an Asia and Pacific regional perspective, highlighting the fact that the overall rate of extreme poverty in rural areas of developing countries has dropped from 48 per cent to 34 per cent over the past decade. …
With the help of the 2004-05 National Sample Survey Organisation unit level consumption expenditure data, this paper tries to estimate the extent of inclusion and exclusion errors in the identification of below-thepoverty line households. In spite of continuous efforts towards improving the methodology of the BPL census, a significant difference …
During the 1970s, major policy debates on the role of mechanisation in agricultural and rural development in south Asia took place; by the early 1990s, such debates had largely faded. Yet today, countries such as Bangladesh possess some of the most productive, mechanised and labour-intensive agricultural industries in south Asia. …
Poverty is more than just material deprivation, it is a state of mind – says writer Martin Kämpchen, who has lived for many years in a disadvantaged part of rural India. Poor people do not have the imagination to help them find ways out of destitution – that is another …
This Social Assessment for the National Rural Livelihoods Project (NRLP) has been prepared after careful review and analysis of the experiences of previous state- and civil society-supported livelihood projects including World Bank-assisted livelihood projects. A comprehensive desk review was carried out of seven previous District Poverty Initiatives /Rural Livelihoods Projects …
This report's objective is to develop the evidence base for policy making in relation to poverty reduction. It produces a diagnosis of the broad nature of the poverty problem and its trends in India, focusing on both consumption poverty and human development outcomes. It also includes attention in greater depth …
Using macro level data on MGNREGA performance in drought-prone states of Karnataka and Rajasthan as well as in irrigation-dominated state of Andhra Pradesh, this study has revealed that the impact of MGNREGA wage on the economic scarcity of labour is relatively modest when compared with the impact of hike in …
