Madhura Swaminathan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3789454 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Madhura Swaminathan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Madhura |
| FAMILY NAME | Swaminathan |
| SIGNATURE | SWAMINATHAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
New Waves of Sugarcane Commercialisation
In Uttar Pradesh, the largest producer of sugarcane in India, the crop is grown on family farms and marketed under an outgrower model with state regulation. Higher productivity and production from a new ‘wonder’ variety, an expansion of private mills and modernisation of infrastructure has led to a new wave of commercialisation. This paper examines implications for agrarian structure and agrarian relations in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, d…
Educational Achievements and Gaps
This paper examines achievements and gaps in the progress of literacy and school education in rural Uttar Pradesh. The analysis in the paper is based on longitudinal data from two villages surveyed in 2006 and 2023 by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies. It examines changes in literacy, the number of years of schooling completed by individuals, and data on school attendance, disaggregated by gender, caste, and class. Mahatwar, in eastern Uttar Pr…
Land and Income Mobility in Two North Indian Villages
Universalising Food Security
Agricultural and Food Policy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Productivity Analysis
The Agrarian Economy
Using evidence from official statistics as well as village studies on incomes from farming across regions, crops, socio-economic classes, and castes, first, I argue that the large majority of cultivators today receive abysmally low incomes and face high variability in incomes. Rising distress can also be inferred from the fact that costs of production have risen faster than government-announced minimum support prices for most crops in most region…
Wealth Mobility
In volume 12, issue 1, of the Review of Agrarian Studies (RAS), a special section focussed on features of contemporary agrarian Bihar drawing on data from village studies conducted as part of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI).1 One of the issues highlighted by these papers was the extreme inequality in the ownership of land and other assets, with a “high correlation between land ownership and caste and class status in the study vi…
Wealth Inequality
This paper examines inequality in ownership of wealth in two villages of North Bihar, drawing on data from the PARI surveys conducted in 2012. The analysis showed extreme levels of inequality, among the highest of the 23 villages surveyed by PARI. Inequality in wealth across socio-economic classes was extremely high, with the top one per cent of households comprising landlords and capitalist farmers owning the bulk of all assets of resident house…
Caste Discrimination in the Provision of Basic Amenities
Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Public Economics, Community/Rural/Urban Development
Time-Use Survey Report 2019
Research Methods/Statistical Methods, Labor and Human Capital, International Development
Methodology of Data Collection Unsuited to Changing Rural Reality
Technological change and the modernisation of agriculture in India have led to many changes in farming practices. The mechanisation of field operations such as ploughing and harvesting, for example, has not only changed total labour use in crop production but has led to changes in labour-hiring practices and in wage forms. There is a rise in labour arrangements that pay wages on a piece-rated basis rather than on a time-rated one. In this article…
In Focus
Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Rural India
Given the relatively limited employment opportunities available within villages, the main vehicle for intergenerational occupational mobility for people in rural India is migration to urban or semi-urban areas. At the same time, since 69 per cent of India's population still lives in villages, it is important to examine and understand the level of intergenerational occupational mobility within villages themselves. This paper examines intergenerati…
Housing Shortages in Rural India
Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development, Public Economics
Who has Access to Formal Credit in Rural India? Evidence from Four Villages
Agricultural Finance, International Development, Labor and Human Capital
Income Inequality and Caste in Village India
In this paper, we examine inequality in incomes between households of different castes in rural India, using a unique dataset comprising household data from a cross-section of eight villages across four States. The focus of this paper is on Dalit or Scheduled Caste households. We begin with very simple measures of differences between groups, such as proportional representation in different quintiles and the frequency distribution of households ac…
Are there Benefits from the Cultivation of Bt Cotton? A Comment Based on Data from a Vidarbha Village
This note examines costs and returns from the cultivation of different types of cotton in a rainfed village in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India. While the pros and cons of GM cotton are extensively debated, there are only a few empirical studies on the economic performance of Bt cotton, particularly under rainfed conditions. The results from a detailed survey of farm business incomes show that Bt cotton was a clear leader in terms of pro…
Is India Really a Country of Low Income-Inequality? Observations from Eight Villages
There is a misconception in the literature that income distribution in India is less unequal than, for instance, in China or the countries of Latin America. This misconception is based on a comparison of like with unlike. Studies of income distribution for most countries are based as they should be on household income data, while corresponding studies of income distribution for India are based on household consumption expenditure data, and it is …
The New Poverty Line
Ending Endemic Hunger
Strategies towards Food Security
Weakening Welfare
Excluding the Needy
It is a great honour and privilege for me to deliver the Eleventh Daniel Thorner Memorial Lecture. Since my first introduction to economics as an undergraduate, the writings of Daniel Thorner have been a source of insight and inspiration as has been his life-long vision of progressive democratic social change. At the very outset, I would like to state that I have chosen to focus on the distribution aspects of food security in the lecture, and as …
Rural Banking and Landless Labour Households
Financial liberalization is a key component of programmes of orthodox structural adjustment. Financial reforms include, among other things, the removal of controls on interest rates and the abolition of programmes of directed credit. Here the effect of financial sector reform on rural banking and rural credit transactions in India is examined, with particular reference to landless labour households. First, the trends in selected indicators of rur…
Consumer food subsidies in India
In recent years, an important item on the agenda of economic reformers in India has been to reduce the scale of food subsidies, by means of targeting the system of public distribution of food (PDS). A recent World Bank study makes concrete suggestions for reform of the PDS and these are examined critically in this article. Specifically, 1 argue against narrow targeting and in favour of broad targeting or near-universal provision of the PDS. I als…
Economic growth and the persistence of child labor
Rural Banking and Landless Labour Households
Financial liberalization is a key component of programmes of orthodox structural adjustment. Financial reforms include, among other things, the removal of controls on interest rates and the abolition of programmes of directed credit. Here the effect of financial sector reform on rural banking and rural credit transactions in India is examined, with particular reference to landless labour households. First, the trends in selected indicators of rur…
Aspects of urban poverty in Bombay
The paper considers poverty and deprivation among two groups of low-income communities in Bombay: pavement dwellers and households living in a designated “slum” area. The author uses longitudinal data to examine relations between changes in income and changes in living conditions and concludes that poverty can be neither understood nor tackled through a simple focus on income but a more comprehensive approach including a consideration of housing …
Excluding the Needy
It is a great honour and privilege for me to deliver the Eleventh Daniel Thorner Memorial Lecture. Since my first introduction to economics as an undergraduate, the writings of Daniel Thorner have been a source of insight and inspiration as has been his life-long vision of progressive democratic social change. At the very outset, I would like to state that I have chosen to focus on the distribution aspects of food security in the lecture, and as …
Economic growth and the persistence of child labor
Consumer food subsidies in India
In recent years, an important item on the agenda of economic reformers in India has been to reduce the scale of food subsidies, by means of targeting the system of public distribution of food (PDS). A recent World Bank study makes concrete suggestions for reform of the PDS and these are examined critically in this article. Specifically, 1 argue against narrow targeting and in favour of broad targeting or near-universal provision of the PDS. I als…
Strategies towards Food Security
Aspects of urban poverty in Bombay
The paper considers poverty and deprivation among two groups of low-income communities in Bombay: pavement dwellers and households living in a designated "slum" area. The author uses longitudinal data to examine relations between changes in income and changes in living conditions and concludes that poverty can be neither understood nor tackled through a simple focus on income but a more comprehensive approach including a consideration of housing …
Aspects of urban poverty in Bombay
The paper considers poverty and deprivation among two groups of low-income communities in Bombay: pavement dwellers and households living in a designated “slum” area. The author uses longitudinal data to examine relations between changes in income and changes in living conditions and concludes that poverty can be neither understood nor tackled through a simple focus on income but a more comprehensive approach including a consideration of housing …
The determinants of earnings among low‐income workers in Bombay
This article estimates the determinants of earnings among workers in low income settlements of Bombay. It uses panel data on workers in two homeless (pavement‐dwelling) communities and two slum communities. The estimated earnings functions, adjusted for community‐ and time‐specific fixed effects, show a good fit. Age and education are significant in all the regressions; however, some of the job‐related variables appear to be more important than t…
Economic growth and the persistence of child labor
Consumer food subsidies in India
In recent years, an important item on the agenda of economic reformers in India has been to reduce the scale of food subsidies, by means of targeting the system of public distribution of food (PDS). A recent World Bank study makes concrete suggestions for reform of the PDS and these are examined critically in this article. Specifically, 1 argue against narrow targeting and in favour of broad targeting or near-universal provision of the PDS. I als…
Weakening Welfare
Excluding the Needy
It is a great honour and privilege for me to deliver the Eleventh Daniel Thorner Memorial Lecture. Since my first introduction to economics as an undergraduate, the writings of Daniel Thorner have been a source of insight and inspiration as has been his life-long vision of progressive democratic social change. At the very outset, I would like to state that I have chosen to focus on the distribution aspects of food security in the lecture, and as …
Rural Banking and Landless Labour Households
Financial liberalization is a key component of programmes of orthodox structural adjustment. Financial reforms include, among other things, the removal of controls on interest rates and the abolition of programmes of directed credit. Here the effect of financial sector reform on rural banking and rural credit transactions in India is examined, with particular reference to landless labour households. First, the trends in selected indicators of rur…
Strategies towards Food Security
Ending Endemic Hunger
The New Poverty Line
Income Inequality and Caste in Village India
In this paper, we examine inequality in incomes between households of different castes in rural India, using a unique dataset comprising household data from a cross-section of eight villages across four States. The focus of this paper is on Dalit or Scheduled Caste households. We begin with very simple measures of differences between groups, such as proportional representation in different quintiles and the frequency distribution of households ac…
Are there Benefits from the Cultivation of Bt Cotton? A Comment Based on Data from a Vidarbha Village
This note examines costs and returns from the cultivation of different types of cotton in a rainfed village in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India. While the pros and cons of GM cotton are extensively debated, there are only a few empirical studies on the economic performance of Bt cotton, particularly under rainfed conditions. The results from a detailed survey of farm business incomes show that Bt cotton was a clear leader in terms of pro…
Is India Really a Country of Low Income-Inequality? Observations from Eight Villages
There is a misconception in the literature that income distribution in India is less unequal than, for instance, in China or the countries of Latin America. This misconception is based on a comparison of like with unlike. Studies of income distribution for most countries are based as they should be on household income data, while corresponding studies of income distribution for India are based on household consumption expenditure data, and it is …
Who has Access to Formal Credit in Rural India? Evidence from Four Villages
Agricultural Finance, International Development, Labor and Human Capital
Housing Shortages in Rural India
Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development, Public Economics
Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Rural India
Given the relatively limited employment opportunities available within villages, the main vehicle for intergenerational occupational mobility for people in rural India is migration to urban or semi-urban areas. At the same time, since 69 per cent of India's population still lives in villages, it is important to examine and understand the level of intergenerational occupational mobility within villages themselves. This paper examines intergenerati…
In Focus
Time-Use Survey Report 2019
Research Methods/Statistical Methods, Labor and Human Capital, International Development
Methodology of Data Collection Unsuited to Changing Rural Reality
Technological change and the modernisation of agriculture in India have led to many changes in farming practices. The mechanisation of field operations such as ploughing and harvesting, for example, has not only changed total labour use in crop production but has led to changes in labour-hiring practices and in wage forms. There is a rise in labour arrangements that pay wages on a piece-rated basis rather than on a time-rated one. In this article…
Caste Discrimination in the Provision of Basic Amenities
Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Public Economics, Community/Rural/Urban Development
Wealth Inequality
This paper examines inequality in ownership of wealth in two villages of North Bihar, drawing on data from the PARI surveys conducted in 2012. The analysis showed extreme levels of inequality, among the highest of the 23 villages surveyed by PARI. Inequality in wealth across socio-economic classes was extremely high, with the top one per cent of households comprising landlords and capitalist farmers owning the bulk of all assets of resident house…
Wealth Mobility
In volume 12, issue 1, of the Review of Agrarian Studies (RAS), a special section focussed on features of contemporary agrarian Bihar drawing on data from village studies conducted as part of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI).1 One of the issues highlighted by these papers was the extreme inequality in the ownership of land and other assets, with a “high correlation between land ownership and caste and class status in the study vi…
Universalising Food Security
Agricultural and Food Policy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Productivity Analysis
The Agrarian Economy
Using evidence from official statistics as well as village studies on incomes from farming across regions, crops, socio-economic classes, and castes, first, I argue that the large majority of cultivators today receive abysmally low incomes and face high variability in incomes. Rising distress can also be inferred from the fact that costs of production have risen faster than government-announced minimum support prices for most crops in most region…
Economics (20 works) · Geography (19 works) · Economic growth (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Socioeconomics (11 works) · Social and Economic Development in India (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Income, Poverty, and Inequality (9 works) · Business (7 works) · Demographic economics (6 works)