Small but effective: India's targeted unconditional cash transfers

Puja Dutta (), Stephen Howes () and Rinku Murgai

ASARC Working Papers from The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre

Abstract: India's approach to social security stresses the provision of subsidized food and public works. Targeted, unconditional cash transfers are little used, and have been little evaluated. An evaluation of cash transfers for the elderly and widows based on national household survey data and surveys on social pension utilization in two of India's states, Karnataka and Rajasthan, reveal that these social pension schemes work reasonably well. Levels of leakage (corruption) are low, funds flow disproportionately to poorer rather than richer households, and there is strong evidence that the funds reach vulnerable individuals. A comparison to the public distribution system reveals that the main strength of the social pensions scheme is its relatively low level of leakage. We hypothesize that social pensions suffer less from corruption than India's other safety net programs either because of the low levels of discretion involved in their delivery, or the small size of the transfers involved. Since we cannot choose between these two hypotheses, the scaling-up of the social pension schemes, currently underway, while warranted, should be closely monitored.

Keywords: Social security; pensions; unconditional cash transfers; India; widows (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 I38 J14 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-cwa
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/acde/asarc/pdf/papers/2010/WP2010_18.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pas:asarcc:2010-18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ASARC Working Papers from The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Raghbendra Jha ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).