Poverty in West Bengal: A Review of Recent Performance and Programmes
Siddhartha Mitra
Chapter 13 in Understanding Development, 2016, pp 191-205 from Springer
Abstract:
Abstract The position of West Bengal in terms of incidence of poverty has improved relative to other states since the 1970s. It also exhibits very little urban bias in regard to incidence of poverty as the gap between urban and rural poverty is low compared to many other states. A worrying fact, however, is that the pace of poverty alleviation in the post-liberalisation period has slackened compared to that in the pre-liberalization period. If we look at the incidence of poverty across districts of West Bengal, we see that these exhibit varying poverty incidence: The districts in the southeastern zone exhibit low to moderate rural as well as urban poverty; those in the southwestern zone exhibit moderate to high poverty, while the poverty in the northern districts shows large variations from low to moderate to high. In regard to performance of poverty alleviation programmes, we focus on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA)—West Bengal does very well in terms of percentage of rural households provided employment and ranks among the top 5–7 major states in this regard. However, the relative performance of districts leaves a lot to be desired: It is observed that the high-poverty districts often exhibit lower impact of the programme (in terms of percentage of rural population registered and works completed per 1000 persons), when these districts should exhibit higher impact.
Keywords: West Bengal; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA); Poverty Incidence; Urban Poverty; High Rural Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
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:spr:isbchp:978-81-322-2455-6_13
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9788132224556
DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-2455-6_13
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in India Studies in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().