This research report on India addresses an important policy issue faced by policy-makers in many developing countries: how to allocate public funds more efficiently in order to achieve both growth and poverty-reduction goals in rural areas. This research is particularly important at a time when…

Developing countries allocate scarce government funds to investments in rural areas to achieve the twin goals of agricultural growth and poverty alleviation. Choices have to be made between different types of investments, especially infrastructure, human capital and agricultural research, and…

Continued agricultural growth and diversification into nonagricultural activities are essential if India is to continue reducing rural poverty. But policymakers hoping to alleviate rural poverty must also be aware of the causes and implications of persisting, if not increasing, inequality within…

Examines—from the perspective of transaction costs—factors that constrain access to land for the rural poor and other socially excluded groups in India. They find that: Land reform has reduced large landholdings since the 1950s. Medium-size farms have gained most. Formidable obstacles still…

Access to land is deeply important in rural India, where the incidence of poverty is highly correlated with lack of access to land. Mearns provides a framework for assessing alternative approaches to improving access to land by India's rural poor. He considers India's record…

Explores the theoretical and actual responses of farmers faced with irrigation supplies that are limited in relation to available land and labor resources, and where the actual schedule and available volume for delivery are uncertain.

This paper reviews perceived notions of the relationships between catchment land use and hydrology and explores whether much of the widely disseminated folklore, so often inextricably linked with issues of land use, is based on myth or reality. Gaps in our knowledge of the underlying processes…