Does India's Employment Guarantee Scheme Guarantee Employment?

Dutta, Puja Vasudeva; Murgai, Rinku; Ravallion, Martin; Walle, Dominique van de

doi:10.1596/1813-9450-6003

Cited by 106 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In practice, supply increasingly appears to be the binding constraint, with NREGS availability being constrained by both the level of budgetary allocations, and by limited local administrative capacity and willingness to implement projects (Dutta et al, 2012;Witsoe, 2014). We confirm this in our data, and find that less than 4% of workers in our control group report that they can access NREGS work whenever they want it (Table 5).…”

Section: The National Rural Employment Guarantee Schemementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Working with the Government of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), 3 we randomized the order in which 158 sub-districts introduced a new "Smartcard" program for making payments in two large welfare programs: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), and Social Security Pensions (SSP). NREGS is the largest workfare program in the world (targeting 800 million rural residents in India), but has well-known implementation issues including leakage and problems with the payment process (Niehaus and Sukhtankar, 2013a,b;Dutta et al, 2012). SSP programs complement NREGS by providing income support to the rural poor who are not able to work (Dutta et al, 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India

Muralidharan¹,

Niehaus²,

Sukhtankar³

2016

American Economic Review

312

184

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Anti-poverty programs in developing countries are often difficult to implement; in particular, many governments lack the capacity to deliver payments securely to targeted beneficiaries. We evaluate the impact of biometrically-authenticated payments infrastructure ("Smartcards") on beneficiaries of employment (NREGS) and pension (SSP) programs in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, using a large-scale experiment that randomized the rollout of Smartcards over 158 subdistricts and 19 million people. We find that, while far from perfectly implemented, the new system delivered a faster, more predictable, and less corrupt NREGS payments process without adversely affecting program access. For each of these outcomes, treatment group distributions first-order stochastically dominated those of the control group. The investment was cost-effective, as time savings to NREGS beneficiaries alone were equal to the cost of the intervention, and there was also a significant reduction in the "leakage" of funds between the government and beneficiaries. We also find evidence of improvements for pension beneficiaries, but these were typically not significant. Beneficiaries overwhelmingly preferred the new system for both NREGS and SSP programs. Overall, our results suggest that investing in secure payments infrastructure can significantly enhance "state capacity" to implement welfare programs in developing countries.JEL codes: D73, H53, O30, O31

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Section: The National Rural Employment Guarantee Schemementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India

Muralidharan¹,

Niehaus²,

Sukhtankar³

2016

American Economic Review

312

184

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“…9 billion dollars), amounting to more than 11% of the 2011 Union budget expenditure. In 2009-10, approximately 53 million households across India were beneficiaries of NREGS (Dutta et al, 2012).…”

Section: Background On Nregsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Workfare and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from India

Shah

Steinberg

2015

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I EIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We examine the effect of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), one of the largest workfare programs in the world, on human capital investment. Since NREGS increases labor demand, it could increase the opportunity cost of schooling, lowering human capital investment even as incomes increase. We exploit the staged rollout of the program across districts for causal identification. Using a household survey of test scores and schooling outcomes for approximately 2.5 million rural children in India, we show that each year of exposure to NREGS decreases school enrollment by 2 percentage points and math scores by 2% of a standard deviation amongst children aged 13-16. In addition, while the impacts of NREGS on human capital are similar for boys and girls, adolescent boys are primarily substituting into market work when they leave school while adolescent girls are substituting into unpaid domestic work. We find mixed results for younger children. We conclude that anti-poverty programs which raise wages could have the unintended effect of lowering human capital investment.JEL Classification: O12, I2, I38, J1

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“…While the program effectively targets the poor, significant rationing remains (Dutta et al 2012a), so that some benefits may be captured by elites (Niehaus and Sukhtankar 2012), thereby reducing the program's effectiveness in transferring resources to the poor (Shankar, Gaiha, and Jha 2011). This is consistent with the finding that access to information significantly affected poor people's ability to benefit from the program (Jha, Bhattacharyya, and Gaiha 2011b), and the presence of a positive association between landholding and NREGS that results in less poverty targeting (Jha et al 2009).…”

Section: Approaches To and Evidence From Nregs Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 99%