NCAER - NATIONAL DATA INNOVATION CENTRE
Professor Sonalde Desai presented paper titled “Rethinking Social Safety Nets in a Changing Society: Evidence from India Human Development Survey” at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Philadelphia in partnership with the South Asia Center & Dept of Sociology.
About the Seminar:
With a growing economy and declining poverty, India faces a curious challenge in providing a social safety net to its citizens. Using data from three rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), collected in 2004-05, 2011-12, and 2022-24, this seminar shows that households face considerable transition in and out of poverty as the economy grows. Historically, India’s approach to social safety nets has involved identifying the poor and providing them with priority access to various social protection programs that include both in-kind and cash assistance—however, the nature of poverty changes with economic growth. This churn in households’ economic circumstances makes it difficult to identify and target the poor precisely.
Using unique, newly collected panel data, Professor Desai makes three observations about India’s anti-poverty programs: (1) Identification of households as poor (now dubbed priority households) relies on identification exercises carried out every 10-15 years and assumes that poverty status is relatively static. However, results presented in this seminar will document a substantial transition in and out of poverty. (2) This ex-ante identification of needy households leads to relatively weak correlation between households’ actual economic status and access to social safety nets. This should not be assumed to be an example of elite capture but rather an artefact of a static program design. (3) Social safety nets may need to be redesigned in a way that is responsive to changing economic conditions and unexpected events, both at an individual and at a community level.