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This article published in The Straits Times  is written by Dr Shekhar Shah Director-General and Dr Rajesh Chadha Senior Research Counsellor NCAER.

India the world’s third-largest economy measured in purchasing power parity terms became a middle-income country in 2007. It has one of the world’s youngest populations with some 260 million people below the age of 25 and its economy is once again growing fast at 7 per cent one of the world’s fastest-growing economies as of last month. But will it grow rich before it grows old?

Rajasthan farmer Shivlal Jat’s four acres help him meet his household expenses. During off-peak periods he has time on his hands. So for the past six to seven years he has demanded work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme and earned an extra ₹9000 every year. This not only helped Jat procure quality seeds and fertiliser but also spend more for the household.

It is these kinds of stories from the ground that form a part of the new National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) report on the rural job-guarantee scheme. Titled ‘A Catalyst for Rural Transformation’ the study is based on data from the India Human Development Survey rounds 1 (2004-05) and 2011-12.

Coming in the wake of declining participation in the programme the study offers some interesting findings. For instance it shows that the scheme contributed on average ₹4000 to household income in 2011-12; and this income was less than 9 per cent of the total income in the surveyed houses. But this small sum could be critical to the poor farmer during the lean season.

In the five years before 2011-12 48 per cent of the rural population borrowed from moneylenders; in 2011-12 only 27 per cent did. The extra earning from MGNREGA also helped enrol children in schools and empowered women workers with access to cash. But of course the scheme could have done more. The study found low participation in several states including Bihar where the scheme was poorly implemented.

Nevertheless the scheme helped reduce poverty by about 32 per cent. Additional employment of 107 crore days for the chronic poor and 54 crore days for those who had slipped into poverty is sufficient to pull them up to non-poor status.

Other important trends highlighted include rising engagement with work outside the family farm and drop in agricultural labour. The non-agricultural work offered under MGNREGA is only a small part of this. Improved transportation is helping villagers find work in nearby towns. A sharp growth in construction in the larger villages offers substantial job opportunities to labourers. Women are finding work as community health workers and anganwadi workers. In places like Uttar Pradesh people find factory work at wages far above what the job-guarantee scheme offers.

However among the poor and the socially vulnerable (agricultural wage labourers) adivasis dalits and other backward classes have dominated MGNREGA participation. The scheme was instrumental in reducing poverty among these groups.

The writer is an organic farmer based in Dahanu Maharashtra

More and more young Indians are choosing their own spouses

HALF a dozen young technology workers are gathered around a table in south Mumbai. In between checking their smartphones they describe an Indian social revolution of which they are in the vanguard. Marriage one woman explains is becoming freer and easier—“less stiff-necked” as she puts it. All have far more choice when it comes to picking a marriage partner than their parents knew: two of the women have even married men from another religion. The old-fashioned marriages that they see on television and in films seem deeply peculiar. “It’s a different world” one says.

Marriage is a central institution in all societies. In India it often seems more important than anything else. Witness the extravagant days-long weddings the lavish gifts of saris and jewellery and the columns of spouse-wanted ads in newspapers—or just watch any Bollywood romantic comedy. Yet marriage in India is also changing in ways that are liberating and exciting but also often confusing.

Nearly all Indian women marry by their late 20s and births out of wedlock are vanishingly rare. Marriages are almost always arranged. Dowry payments are widespread. About 90-95% of the time Hindus marry within their broad caste group. But if the basic rules of the game are fixed the style of play is different these days.

Gourav Rakshit the chief executive of a popular website for seeking marriage partners Shaadi.com spies a subtle but momentous change. It used to be that parents and older siblings drove the matchmaking process he says lining up potential partners whom the spouse-to-be might veto. These days the offspring tend to be in charge of finding their own partners but parents may veto them. “What has not changed is that marriage is a family decision” he explains. “What has changed is who is driving the process.”

Fully 73% of the profiles on Shaadi.com have been put there by people who are seeking partners for themselves not by their parents or brothers. These days most new users (about 12000 to 15000 people sign up each day) access the website via smartphones. Those phones which are bringing the internet to millions of new users are themselves changing the matchmaking process. Tech-savvy Indians can now find out all about potential partners by tracking their digital traces through social media or just by texting and telephoning. Parents need never know.

If small numbers of highly educated urbanites were becoming more individualistic it would be little more than an interesting wrinkle in Indian life. However the change is much more widespread than that. To begin with this group is no longer small. Fully a quarter of young Indians were in tertiary education in 2013 according to the World Bank up from 11% a decade earlier. Education and control over marriage go together (see chart).

And it is not just the wealthy who see marriage differently. The teenagers who live in Dharavi a long-established slum between two railway lines in Mumbai feel themselves to be just as culturally distinct from rural Indians as the technology workers do. Young men from Dharavi sometimes marry village women who come to live with them. Asked about this one teenage slum girl launches into a wicked impersonation of a rural bride all namastes and scraping deference to her husband. (A Muslim boy is more equivocal: Mumbai girls know how to handle technology he says but rural girls know how to handle mothers-in-law.)

Although caste is still powerful in Dharavi it is gradually giving way to the money god. Teenage boys insist that good jobs—government jobs especially—are now more important both for snagging good partners and for asserting control over marriage decisions. One of the boys an orphan has a girlfriend and wants to marry her. Her parents object to his caste but he reckons he can wear down their objections by finishing his education and getting a better job.

Dipankar Gupta a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University says that caste is crumbling as India urbanises. Nearly a third of Indians now live in cities or towns while villages are tied increasingly to urban economies. The village bosses who enforce caste rules have less power than they did. Some north Indian village elders have chosen to relax the rules anyway because so many single men are in search of wives—a consequence of sex-selective abortions. Caste is now less an institution than a mess of prejudices about the superiority of one’s own group.

Popular culture is driving change too. In parts of Dharavi the greatest hazard for a pedestrian is not the open sewer beneath your feet but the tangle of wires around your head. Many of these wires carry cable-television signals. They transmit soap operas and movies which often depict the struggle between love and tradition. Though these seem stuffy to the upper middle classes they can be a revelation to the poor. Nayreen Daruwalla of SNEHA a Mumbai charity has heard women complain that their husbands do not sing to them as men do in Bollywood films.

One big thing stands in the way of further change says Sonal Desai another academic. Indian parents still assume they will live with their sons. That explains why they exert so much control over marriage: they are in effect choosing a cook and a future carer. Yet this too is beginning to weaken. Ms Desai conducted a huge survey of Indians in 2011-12 which found that 77% of women over 60 lived with their married children—still a big proportion but lower than the 83% who did so in 2004-05. Small houses and high-rise flats are shooting up in Indian suburbs suggesting the share is going to fall further.

Indian marriage still looks very different from the Western kind (which is changing too). Yet prosperity and technology are eroding tradition. People Group which owns Shaadi.com even invested in a dating app earlier this year. Such apps which were unimaginable in India until recently have not taken off yet. “The guys are all keen” says Mr Rakshit “but the girls aren’t there yet.”

UNCLEAR PROPERTY RIGHTS AND RECORDS PUT INVESTMENT IN INDIA’S MANUFACTURING AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECTORS AND ITS FINANCIAL SECTOR AT RISK

With over 93% of natural resource development in emerging economies at risk for land conflict the global land investment experience has key lessons for India

NEW DELHI (3 September 2015)—India’s private and public sectors which need land for their industry infrastructure and service sector operations as well as its financial sector are bearing the brunt of project delays and non-performing assets linked to land rights conflicts.

The issue is not unique to India. Unresolved conflicts over land tenure have been shown to significantly increase financial risk for companies in the infrastructure mining agriculture and forestry sectors across the world according to TMP Systems an international consultancy that has carried out extensive work on quantifying the risk related to land rights in large-scale projects.

TMP Systems’ analysis last year spanning almost 73000 commercial natural resource developments in eight countries found that over 93 percent of the developments were inhabited. It is currently analyzing 262 land tenure case studies in 30 countries showing clear and consistent material impacts of unclear land rights on assets including dams farms mills mines orchards and timberland.

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Leakages and diversion of subsidised food grains under the TPDS continue to be at unacceptable levels whereas the rollout of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) has led to comparatively better outcomes going by an NCAER survey.

Although the National Council of Applied Economic Research’s draft report prepared after a survey covering 24 districts of six states — Assam Bihar Chhattigarh Uttar Pradesh Karnataka and West Bengal — doesn’t arrive at such definitive conclusions it is clear from the data gathered that the extent of leakages is lower in the states (districts) where  NFSA has been implemented.

Of course in case of Chhattisgarh the TPDS itself had led to big improvements. But the increased efficiency in reaching the beneficiaries achieved in Bihar may have underscored the NFSA’s utility. It may however be noted that the NFSA coverage is higher than that under TPDS.

NCAER which prepared the evaluation report of TPDS on behalf of the ministry of consumer affairs and public distribution has attributed the persistence of higher levels of pilferage to factors such as inappropriate identification of below poverty line (BPL) families and the huge cost of misidentification along with inefficiencies in the supply chain that contribute to the high cost of delivery in most states.  “The supply chain of the PDS is riddled with malpractice at different levels including the administrative level” the NCAER said.

Out of six states evaluated by NCAER Bihar Chhattiagarh and Karnataka have already commenced implementation of NFSA under which around 64% of the country’s population are legally entitled to get highly subsidised food grain at five kg per head in a month. The rest of the states which are implementing TPDS provide subsidised food grain at 35 kg to each family monthly to BPL and Antodaya AnnaYojana (AAY) families. Besides  the states provide subsidised food grains to Above Poverty Line (APL) families as well. The TPDS coverage is around 45-50% of the population of the states concerned.

As per the report Chhattisgarh has reported lowest food grain leakage rate of 6.95% amongst the six states covered for TPDS evaluation. Karnataka and Bihar which have rolled out NFSA have reported grain leakage of 17.34% and 16.28% respectively.

The study acknowledges that the huge difference between the open market and TPDS prices of rice and wheat is one of the most important reasons for the high usage of the PDS amongst the poor families. However the NCAER study states that eligible people do not always receive ration cards if they are not politically well-connected or are unwilling to pay a bribe.

In terms of number of bogus or ghost ration cards Assam Chhattisgarh and Karnataka have the lower numbers compared to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. “Bihar had issued new ration cards in a hurry to implement NFSA within stipulated time frame resulting in incorrect identification of eligible households and Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of bogus cards in the system among the non-NFSA states” the study has noted.

For curbing food grain leakages the NCAER report suggests distribution of 12 food coupons annually which beneficiaries would exchange every month while collecting their quota of food grains. It also recommended usage of electronic weighing machines in place of conventional ones for resolving the issue of beneficiaries receiving less than their entitlement of foodgrains under the TPDS.

On the need for digitisation of ration cards the report said that many of the states who claim completion of the process have not been completed as these cards are yet to be circulated to beneficiaries.

Published in: The Financial Express September 1 2015