The Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), 2011 is being carried out by the Government of India to generate information on a large number of social and economic indicators relating to households across the country.

Providing sustainable financial services for rural areas and agriculture in developing countries has proven to be difficult in spite of recent reforms and billions of dollars spent in subsidizing programs to develop financial institutions. This paper presents a literature review of the lessons learned in the use of subsidies and investments as instruments of agricultural development finance.

This book addresses one of the most intractable problems in development – what can poor people in rural areas do to improve their lives? Most of the one billion people living in rich countries and about three-quarters of the 5.6 billion people living in developing countries have left poverty behind and are enjoying improving livelihoods.

The Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) was founded in 2000 to challenge, through research, the apparent omission of almost a billion people from the 2015 poverty target of the Millennium Development Goals. The first decade of the 21st century has illustrated the power of economic growth and human development to bring large numbers out of poverty.