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Assessing the Outreach of Targeted Development Programmes—A Case Study from a South Indian Village

This paper explores beneficiary targeting of government programmes in a village in India. The analysis is based on all 228 households of the village and focus group discussions. The results show that there is a large exclusion error in targeted programmes, which have mostly excluded the poor and the needy. Most schemes have a prerequisite of asset ownership, such as agricultural land, which benefits resource-rich farmers with large landholdings. The relationship between benefits received and income of households is best represented by an inverted ‘u’-shape curve, indicating the middle-income category benefits more than the poorest. The scope and scale of welfare programmes, especially Direct Benefit Transfers, increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. For inclusion of the poorest of the poor, welfare and development schemes need to be decoupled from landownership in rural areas.