The management information system of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 was hailed as a pioneering tool for enhancing transparency and accountability. However, it is now being used with impunity to centralise the programme and violate workers’ legal entitlements, causing frequent disruptions on the ground and opening new avenues for corruption in the programme.
Bihar's public distribution system used to be one of the worst in India, but the system has improved significantly from 2011 onwards. The National Food Security Act, backed early on by the political leadership, enabled the state to include the bulk of the rural population in this improved system. However, there is still a long way to go in ensuring that the system is reliable, transparent and corruption-free.
This paper takes a look at regional patterns of human and child deprivation in India, based on district-level data. It presents and compares two simple summary indices of living conditions at the district level: a standard "human development index" and a variant of it focusing specifically on children.
Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency.
The National Advisory Council's recommendations on the National Food Security Bill are in danger of being brushed aside.
It is the fate of most advisory committees that the government accepts whatever advice suits its purposes and ignores the rest. The first version of the National Advisory Council (NAC-1) managed to avoid that fate to some extent, due to favourable circumstances.
Utsa Patnaik’s new critique of our work on food and nutrition is wholly unconvincing. Her analysis of international patterns of “total” cereal consumption, interesting as it may be, does not invalidate anything we wrote, and certainly does not indict us of any “fallacies”. And her attempt to demonstrate that the decline of cereal intake in India reflects “severe demand-deflation for the majority of the population” is based on a circular argument.
This paper explores the possibility of a simple method for the identification of households eligible for social assistance. In exploring alternative approaches for identifying a
