Agrarian contracts and rural poverty in India

The project investigates to what extent traditional contractual arrangements, which are intertwined with kinship and caste relationships and may have an exploitative character, can explain the comparative lack of economic progress in the rural sector. We also investigate the flip-side of that coin: to what extent will better options outside traditional arrangements, whether in the rural or the urban economy, change power relations in remote rural areas? The two government interventions that mainly concern us are the rural employment guarantee scheme and the provision of all-weather roads. We pay particular attention to how their effects differ across castes and social groups. The project thus intends to contribute to our understanding of the link from national economic growth to poverty reduction among different social groups in remote villages. The analysis is based on panel data from rural Orissa, whereby a new round have been added to surveys previously conducted by team members.