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21. Budget Brief 2019-20: Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana - Gramin (PMAY - G)

Author:
Sahithya Venkatesan and Avani Kapur
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana - Gramin (PMAY - G) is Government of India’s (GoI’s) flagship ‘Housing for All’ scheme. The scheme was launched in November 2016 and aims to provide monetary assistance for the construction of a pucca house with basic amenities to all rural houseless households and those living in dilapidated and kutcha houses. Using government data, this brief reports on trends in PMAY-G along the following parameters: Allocations and cost estimates; Releases and expenditures ; Beneficiary selection and target setting ; Target completion and physical progress of house construction ; Payments to Beneficiaries.
Topic:
Government, Poverty, Budget, and Rural
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

22. Behavioural Change Communication (BCC) Approach for BRAC: A Formative Research

Author:
Tanvir Shatil and Rabbi Ahmed
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), Brac University
Abstract:
As a part of social development, BRAC has been working in the Behavioural Change Communication (BCC) areas of its program participants for decades. Facing a revolutionary technological change, it is time to rethink the effectiveness of the conventional BCC tools and revise them if necessary. This study revealed the existing patterns of cultural and recreational activities at the community level that can be broadly categorized into seasonal, periodic, and everyday entertainment. Different modalities and purposiveness of entertainment, such as secular entertainment, religious entertainment, sports-based entertainment, national interests, local market-oriented entertainment, mobile-oriented entertainment, cable network and television, social media, were found to exist in the community. It was also found that a significant change has occurred in the span of everyday entertainment in both rural and peri-urban areas. This entire context was in such a phase that the information and communication technology developed in a noteworthy way. As a result, the sources of entertainment and information became personalized, localized, and digitalized. The advancement of technology created a new form of “digital and virtual culture” in the community. Mobile phones had become a vibrant source of entertainment and information, shaping a notion of personalization of information and entertainment among the community people. Since internet packages offered by different mobile operators were expensive, both in rural and peri-urban areas people did not have significant access to the internet. But they had another organized structure through which they obtained digital contents and stored them on their electronic devices. Orienting this exchange of digital contents, an informal market mechanism emerged in the community which was also explored in this study. Finally, it emerged from the cases of BRAC’s conventional BCC practices in the community that printed pictorial posters and flipcharts (conventionally used by BRAC) were losing their appeal to the target audience. Based on the findings of the study, it is now important for BRAC to consider new approaches to information, communication, and education methods while preserving some of the effective conventional methods as well.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Rural, and Behavior
Political Geography:
Bangladesh and South Asia

23. Census Towns in India - Current Patterns and Future Discourses

Author:
Shamindra Nath Roy and Jaya Prakash Pradhan
Publication Date:
05-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
The surge in census towns (CTs) during Census 2011 has drawn a lot of attention to the ongoing and future dynamics of these in-situ urban settlements in India. Using the village level information from the previous and current censuses, the present study attempts to identify the villages that can be classified as a census town in 2021. While the prevailing dataset bears some obstacles for a neat identification of such settlements, it can be observed that a fairly high number of rural areas may be classified as CTs in future, which currently accommodates a population of 17.9 million. While the current nature of regional distribution of these areas may not vary much over the future, their areal characteristics over time portray multiple spatial processes undergirding India’s urban trajectory. A lot of these prospective CTs are also relatively prosperous than their current rural neighbourhoods, which reinforces the persistence of similar pattern of urban transformation in future.
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Urbanization, Census, and Rural
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

24. Power and Compliance in Rural Bhutanese Society

Author:
Fredrik Barth
Publication Date:
11-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Bhutan Studies
Institution:
Centre for Bhutan & GNH Studies (CBS)
Abstract:
I am very happy to have this opportunity to discuss some questions concerning social organization and the organization of agricultural labour in Bhutanese rural society. Bhutan is an independent country in the Eastern Himalayas, about the size of Switzerland, with an overwhelmingly Buddhist population of c. 600,000 persons. Having never been under any foreign administration, and despite recent modern developments, it has maintained a high degree of isolation through most of its history. It thus offers an opportunity to study a living case of a highly distinctive form of agrarian society.
Topic:
Development, Rural, Society, Compliance, and Power
Political Geography:
South Asia and Bhutan

25. Analysis of Payment Delays and Delay Compensation in MGNREGA

Author:
Rajendran Narayanan, Sakina Dhorajiwala, and Rajesh Golani
Publication Date:
04-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides a minimum of 100 days of work in a year for every rural household at a minimum wage. Because of MGNREGA, for the first time in the country, a transaction-based Management Information System (MIS) has been made available in the public domain; a great feather in the cap of transparency. An essential safeguard in MGNREGA is delay compensation to be paid, as penalty, when workers don’t receive wages within 15 days of completion of work. Despite several progressive measures, payment delays are rampant and the method of delay compensation is flawed leading to massive under-calculation of the true payable compensation. By analysing over 9 million transactions for the financial year 2016-17 across 10 states, we observe that only 21% of the payments were made on time. In 47% of the records analysed, only partial delay compensation is being captured and the remaining 32% of the records are not even being considered as delays in the NREGA MIS. These are due to the flawed method of calculating delay compensation. On aggregate, in our sample, while the true total compensation payable is about Rs 36 crore, only about Rs 15.6 crore is being calculated in the MIS.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Employment, Rural, Transparency, Sustainability, and Data
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

26. Is the BJP in Trouble? Caste, Class, and the Urban-Rural Divide in Gujarat

Author:
Ashish Ranjan and Neelanjan Sircar
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
After 22 years in power, the BJP is feeling the heat this year in Gujarat's election campaign. This paper analyses the reasons for this sudden frustration with the BJP – with a particular focus on caste mobilisation, urban-rural division, and emerging class politics in Gujarat.
Topic:
Politics, Urbanization, Elections, Class, Rural, and Caste
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

27. Understanding India’s Urban Frontier: What Is behind the Emergence of Census Towns in India?

Author:
Partha Mukhopadhyay, Marie-Hélène Zérah, Gopa Samanta, and Augustin Maria
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
This paper presents the results of an investigation of selected census towns in northern India. Census towns are settlements that India’s census classifies as urban although they continue to be governed as rural settlements. The 2011 census featured a remarkable increase in the number of census towns, which nearly tripled between 2001 and 2011, from 1,362 to 3,894. This increase contributed to nearly a third (29.5 percent) of the total increase in the urban population during this period. Only part of this evolution can be attributed to the gradual urbanization of settlements in the vicinity or larger towns. Instead, the majority of census towns appear as small “market towns,” providing trade and other local services to a growing rural market. The case studies of representative census towns in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal show the role of increased connectivity and growing rural incomes in driving the demand for the small scale and non-tradable services, which are the main sources of nonfarm employment in these settlements.The case studies also reveal that the trade-offs between urban and rural administrative statuses are actively debated in many of these settlements. Although statistical comparisons do not show a significant impact of urban or rural administrative status on access to basic services, urban status is often favored by the social groups involved in the growing commercial and services sectors, and resisted by the residents still involved in the traditional farming sectors.
Topic:
Urbanization, Economy, Census, and Rural
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

28. Whose Side Are You Om? Identifying The Distributive Preferences of Local Politicians in India

Author:
Mark Schneider and Neelanjan Sircar
Publication Date:
08-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Abstract:
The literature on decentralized public programs suggests that errors in the targeting of anti-poverty programs are rooted in the capture of these programs by local elites or local politicians. Consistent with the literature on moral economy in political science and experimental economics, we argue that voters in contexts of rural poverty prefer local leaders who target subsistence benefits to the poor. In a high- information village context, where voters and leaders know each other, we argue that local elections lead to the selection of local leaders with pro-poor preferences over the distribution of these benefits. We show this with a novel theory of local politicians’ social preferences. We test our theory with unique data from a behavioral measure, conducted in the context of a lottery with a modest cash prize in rural India, that captures a scenario in which local leaders have full discretion and anonymity over allocation among members of their rural communities. We analyze our data using a novel estimation strategy that takes the characteristics of the pool of potential beneficiaries into account in decisions over allocation under a budget constraint. We find that local leaders have strong preferences for targeting the poor, and particularly those they believe supported them politically in the past. This article suggests that free and fair elections at the local level can powerfully encourage pro-poor targeting even in contexts of weak institutions and pervasive poverty. It also makes a fundamental contribution to research on distributive politics by challenging research in this area to demonstrate the effect of electoral strategies and other distortions on allocation relative to local leaders’ baseline distributive preferences.
Topic:
Elections, Domestic Politics, Rural, Local, and Decentralization
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

29. Quality and Accountability in Healthcare Delivery: Audit Evidence from Primary Care Providers in India

Author:
Jishnu Das, Alaka Holla, Aakash Mohpal, and Karthik Muralidharan
Publication Date:
02-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Policy Research, India
Abstract:
We present among the first direct evidence on the quality of healthcare in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly-representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We report three main findings. First, private providers are mostly unqualified but spent more time with patients, and completed more items on a checklist of essential history and examination items than public providers, while being no different in their diagnostic and treatment accuracy. Second, we identify the private practices of qualified public sector doctors, and show that the same doctors exert higher effort and are more likely to provide correct treatment in their private practices. Third, we find a strong positive correlation between provider effort and prices charged in the private sector, whereas we find no correlation between effort and wages in the public sector. Our results suggest that market-based accountability in the unregulated private sector may be providing better incentives for provider effort than administrative accountability in the public sector in this setting. While the overall quality of care is low in both the public and private sectors, these differences in provider effort may partly explain the dominant market share of fee-charging private providers even in the presence of a system of free public healthcare.
Topic:
Government, Health, Privatization, Health Care Policy, Social Policy, and Rural
Political Geography:
South Asia, India, and Asia

30. Despair or Hope: Rural Livelihoods and Opium Poppy Dynamics in Afghanistan

Author:
Paul Fishstein
Publication Date:
08-2014
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU)
Abstract:
AREU conducted field research in Badakhshan, Balkh, Helmand and Nangarhar Provinces during the three agricultural years from 2010-11 to 2012-13, to explore the dynamics of opium poppy cultivation: the history of government policies and programmes and the ways in which these policies and programmes affected the ability of rural households to maintain their livelihoods.
Topic:
Agriculture, Environment, Natural Resources, and Rural
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and South Asia