Economic impact of IRDP and educational preference

Abstract

The issue of poverty in India has remained of prevalent concern. In spite of having witnessed an encouraging growth rate in the recent years, certain regions and certain sections of the society have lagged behind. A large mass of people still resides in extreme poverty and deprivation and finds it difficult to meet the minimum requirements of acceptable living standard. Intervention of the government to assist these sections of the society, to help them cross the poverty line is thus required. Government Intervention has continued through the decades of planning. The efforts of the government to eradicate (or alleviate) poverty may be broadly discussed under the category of self-employment and wage employment programs. IRDP, a representative example of the self-employment programs was the first major government intervention (in the late 1970s). This program aimed at income augmentation, sustained income stream and self-sufficiency of the poor to enable the poor to cross poverty line. On the contrary, the public works program, a representative example of the wage employment program aimed at providing immediate assistance to the poor, by guaranteeing them employment in the lean season and in times of distress. Additionally through the labor-intensive public works programs, community assets would be built which would help in the development of the region. newlineThe first chapter of the thesis studies the IRDP and the Public Works program, and provides impact estimates of the same on annual household consumption expenditure, annual household food expenditure and annual purchases from the Public Distribution System using the Propensity Score Estimation Method. This analysis has been done at an All-India level as well as separately for the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. This method of estimation provides precise impact estimates and digresses from the massive pool of evaluation studies (of IRDP) based on the poverty-line approach . The analysis also offers evidence indicating that beneficiaries of the IRDP