Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as a proxy for individual poverty.

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 minimum wage. 

India’s huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982–99.

This paper examines the performance thus far of MGNREGS in meeting the demand for work across states. It focuses in the scheme‘s ability to reach India‘s rural poor and other identity-based groups, notably backward castes, tribes and takes a closer look at women‘s participation and how this is influenced by the
rationing of work under MGNREGS.