(When) Do Antipoverty Programs Reduce Violence? India's Rural Employment Guarantee and Maoist Conflict

Abstract

Theory and extensive evidence connect poverty and underdevelopment to civil conflict yet evidence on the impact of development programs on violence is surprisingly mixed. To break this impasse, we exploit a within-country policy experiment to examine the conditions under which antipoverty programs reduce violence. The roll-out of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme caused a large long-run reduction in Maoist conflict violence, as measured with an original data set based on local-language press sources. These pacifying effects were not uniform, however, but overwhelmingly concentrated in districts with sufficient pre-existing local state capacity to implement the program effectively. The results demonstrate the potential for anti-poverty programs to mitigate violent civil conflict by improving livelihoods, but also highlight the crucial role of state capacity in shaping these effects.

Can Workfare Programs Moderate Conflict? Evidence from India

“…Vanden Eynde (2016) and find evidence in support of an opportunity cost channel driving Maoist conflict. Dasgupta et al (2017), which is closely related to this paper, use a difference-in-differences approach to compare districts that received NREGA early with those that received it later; they find that the introduction is correlated with a reduction in conflict. This approach is not without problems because the sequence of NREGA's roll-out was far from random.…”

Financial inclusion through a public works programme: Does left‐wing extremism make a difference?

“…The district-level controls (μ) include district domestic product per capita (DDP) as a control for demand conditions and number of bank branches per 1,000 persons as a proxy for financial infrastructure, η represents year effects and finally, ε is the random error term. Akin to Dasgupta et al (2017), all regressions control for the score of the district on the backwardness index (BI), interacted with year dummy variables, so as to minimize possible concerns regarding non-parallel time trends across different phases, emanating from the assignment of less developed districts as measured on the backwardness index to earlier phases of the programme.…”

“…To provide some examples, Barooah (2008) employs an ordinary least squares (OLS) framework and finds that Maoist conflict violence across districts increases with poverty and declines with literacy. Dasgupta, Gawande and Kapur (2017) along with Fetzer (2014) find that the effect of Maoist violence is mitigated by the roll-out | 21 GHOSH of a large public works programme (MGNREGS) in Maoist-affected states. In contrast, Khanna and Zimmermann (2017) argue that LWE violence increases after the introduction of MGNREGS because of the increased polarization of the civilian population between government and Maoist supporters.…”

Civil Conflict and Antipoverty Programmes: Effects on Demobilisation

“…In their analysis, the authors found that the programme reduced conflict related incidents and insurgent influence in treated villages by weakening for the deleterious effect it had on insurgent recruitment. Dasgupta, Gawande, and Kapur (2014) estimated the effects of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on the Maoist conflict in India. The authors found that the programme reduced violent incidents and deaths, providing evidence of the effects of this policy on the mitigation of violent civil conflict.…”