Poverty and Social Protection in Urban India

This paper, highlights the need for provisioning adequate social protection coverage to the vulnerable sections of population in urban India, assesses the role of the TPDS in reaching out to the deprived groups and, through implicit income transfers, influencing positive welfare outcomes. This paper aims to provide broad indications on how effectiveness of social protection measures is closely linked with targeting efficiency. By providing food-grains to identified target-group of households at subsidized prices, the TPDS has the potential to divert the ‘surplus’ household income to other non-food domains such as education and health, having direct impacts on improving living standards.