In India, migration research has chiefly concentrated upon determining the causes rather than the effects of migration. A review of the extant literature reveals a near absence of studies exploring the linkages between remittances and poverty in India. This paper attempts to partly fill that void by assessing the effect of remittances on rural development. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), which carried out a nationwide survey on migration in 2007-2008, reported that out-migrants from rural India have a much higher propensity to remit compared to their urban counterparts. As rural poverty in India continues to pose the most fundamental development challenge, this paper explores on the basis of unit level data obtained from the NSSO survey whether transfer income in the form of remittances help to alleviate/deintensify poverty among recipient rural households. Using the nascent technique of covariate balancing propensity score, rural households receiving remittances are matched with households that have similar background characteristics but do not receive remittances, and the impact of remittance income on their poverty status is subsequently ascertained. After correcting for self-selection, the study finds that remittance income from both internal as well as international sources do serve to lower the incidence of poverty among rural households although, expectedly, international remittances seem to have a stronger poverty alleviating effect.

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This article combines two relatively nascent and interrelated approaches to poverty analysis and measurement, that is, the asset-based approach and the vulnerability approach to assess the poverty status of various land-owning classes in rural India. Contingent on the finding that marginal and smallholder households constitute a high-risk group in terms of the incidence of current poverty and vulnerability to future poverty, the study explores the role of non-agricultural activity in providing livelihood security and tackling poverty and vulnerability among land-poor rural households. The findings reveal that while most types of rural non-farm employment have significant poverty-reducing effects, human capital constitutes the most potent element in tackling poverty in the target group. We therefore suggest that an emphasis on skill upgradation of marginal and small landholders, coupled with policies directed towards development of non-farm activity, could provide an effective, permanent solution for curbing poverty and mitigating livelihood risks among these households.

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This study examines the impact of remittances on the labour market decisions of left behind adult family members in rural households in India. Using both selectivity and endogeniety corrected models, the results find evidence of a dependency effect wherein individuals belonging to remittance receiving households are less inclined to participate in the labour market. These effects are much stronger in case of international remittances. Incidentally, the reduction in work participation was found to larger for males than females. While, on the one hand, domestic remittances were observed to increase the intensity of labour supplied by households, international remittances, on the other hand, were found to be lowering hours of work done by left behind family members. Further, domestic remittances increase the proportion of labour supplied to self-employment activities in agriculture; international remittances, on the contrary, were found to be pushing workers into non-agricultural activities. The differences in the impact of domestic and international remittances on labour market participation and work intensity can be attributed to the differences in absolute size of remittances available per capita from the two alternate sources while unobservable household characteristics and locational factors can explain the variations in intra-household labour allocation across activities.