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To what extent has chronic poverty increased during the pandemic? In July and August 2021, we revisited seven villages of southern Rajasthan (India), where we had studied household poverty dynamics in 2002. We find that in the two decades before the pandemic (2002–2020), people's structural positions improved vastly, chronic poverty fell from nearly half to less than 20% of households. These gains in resilience helped people cope with the pandemic. The majority suffered deep income losses between February 2020 and August 2021, but there is no evidence of any substantive rise in chronic poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The workfare scheme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), and the direct food subsidy programme, the Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TPDS), represent two social safety nets instituted in India as anti-poverty measures. This paper examines whether from the point of view of individual households the two programmes are substitutes or complements, as this will shed light on the appropriateness of the design of the two programmes. Based on primary household data collected for the Indian states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (MP), we show that, in Rajasthan, a large percentage of households consider TPDS and NREGS programmes to be substitutes for each other, while in MP the households often perceive the two programmes as complements. Thus it appears that the two programmes are better designed in MP since an incentive for participation in one programme has desirable side effects on participation in the other. Correlates of participation in the two states are identified and the paper advances several policy conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The poverty status of all 4,198 households resident in 18 villages of Rajasthan, India, was examined at four points of time between 1977 and 2010 using a retrospective methodology known as Stages of Progress. Households that were consistently poor at all four points over the 33 years were regarded as the intergenerational poverty (IGP) group. Their characteristics and experiences were compared with those of other village households, which - after being consistently poor at the first three points in time - had overcome poverty before the fourth (and final) measurement. The article shows how an impoverished inheritance, made worse by a succession of adverse events (mostly of an everyday kind), has trapped households within IGP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]