Study by Muralidharan and Niehaus Finds Deletion of Valid Ration Cards | India Today

India Today reported on a new study by CEGA affiliates Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus that found that almost 90 percent of government-cancelled ration cards in the study area of Jharkhand were held by real households.

“A limited study conducted in 10 of the 24 districts of Jharkhand has found that almost 90 per cent of ration cards cancelled by the state government three years ago belonged to genuine households.

The study was carried out by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), co-founded by Abhijit Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo, both of whom won the Nobel Economics Prize in 2019.

A random sample of nearly 4,000 ration cards that were verified revealed that “just over 10 per cent belonged to ‘ghosts’, meaning households that could not be traced,” it said.

“In 2017, lakhs of ration cards were deleted in Jharkhand without even informing the households concerned,” claims the study, co-authored by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar.”

Source: 90% ration cards cancelled in Jharkhand genuine: Study – India News