Articles by Raghbendra Jha

The performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, even as revealed by government statistics, has been disappointing and, if anything, has deteriorated over time. Using offi cial data, this article evaluates the NREGS according to the average number of days of employment per household, the percentage of households completing 100 days of employment, the percentage of expenditure against total available funds, and the percentage of work completed. The performance across the fi rst two criteria has been disappointing and the average number of days of employment per household has declined over time. The percentage of expenditure against total available funds has risen sharply, particularly since 2010-11, and has been consistently higher than the work completed as a percentage of the work planned.

The fragility of livelihoods and hence the vulnerability of consumption growth due to aggregate shocks in the Indian rural sector have been highlighted recently. However, as yet there exist no estimates of the vulnerability of consumption growth in rural India. This paper attempts to fill this lacuna by providing "certainty equivalent growth of consumption" in 14 major states of India over the period 1958-97, corresponding to NSS rounds 13th to 53rd. It is shown that certainty equivalent growth of consumption in rural India has been much lower than average real per capita consumption growth - indeed, in some cases, it has been negative. This points to the poor performance of consumer-perceived average welfare in India's rural sector and should be a matter of urgent policy concern.

This paper focuses on the fundamental question of whether the government's budgetary subsidies, estimated as unrecovered costs, can exceed the gross fiscal deficit. It explores the reasons for the wide gaps in the measure of fiscal deficit and the estimate of aggregate subsidy, and suggests an improvement in methodology for the latter, using the example of Maharashtra to tally the aggregate unrecovered costs. The paper shows that the subsidy estimated as unrecovered costs of the present consumption programme should not exceed the budgetary fiscal deficit.

Reforms and Growth Accelerating Growth and Poverty Reduction by Arvind Virmani; Academic Foundation, New Delhi, January 2004; pp 327, Rs 695 (in India), $39 (abroad).