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Rinku Murgai
Rinku Murgai is a Lead Economist at the World Bank, based in the New Delhi office. She has interest and analytic skills in the general areas of poverty, vulnerability and public policy, encompassing poverty and inequality measurement; functioning of labour, land and water markets; and social protection design, delivery and evaluation. Rinku holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Economics from Swarthmore College, and a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
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Poverty reduction in India: Revisiting past debates with 60 years of data
There has been much debate about the poverty impacts of economic growth and structural transformation in developing countries. This column revisits these issues using a newly constructed dataset of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years. There has been a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991, despite rising inequality. Post-1991 data suggest stronger inter-sectoral linkages. Urban consumption growth came with gains to both the rural and urban poor. The primary/secondary/tertiary composition of growth has ceased to matter, as all three sectors contributed to poverty reduction.
Beyond leaky pipes: Fixing enrolment systems of welfare schemes
Policy initiatives of JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar, Mobile numbers) trinity and direct benefit transfer focus on unclogging the supply of benefits under welfare schemes by reducing payment leakages. This column shows that bottlenecks to the entry of deserving beneficiaries into such schemes and misallocation of resources to the ineligible are even more significant, and deserve similarly high-profiled attention.