M Venkaiah Naidu – The Man Who Challenged Poverty

Over the last twenty years Government of India has launched a series of Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) with a view to promote development, reduce poverty, and reach basic services in education and health, etc to the common people. While the individual programmes have been evaluated several times showing that in general these are better implemented in states with stronger political leadership and better capacity for delivery, no comparative study is available to my mind that will explain why in the same state some programmes are more successful than others in achieving their goals or why some schemes do not work well even in states associated with better governance.