ARTICLE: "Shoveling for their supper: The world's biggest public-works project just got bigger," The Economist, 26 April 2008, p. 57.

An FDR-like public works project manned by rural poor, who can ask for and receive 100 days of work each year from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), something the Congress Party dreamed up as a platform plank in its winning return a few years back (2004).

Why needed? It is estimated that 85% of state welfare spending fails to reach intended recipients.

Nice.

India will compare weakly to China for a long time because it exalts the village so, a bad legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, with all his self-sufficiency nonsense. So India doesn't try to lure rural poor into cities (plenty go there to find few manufacturing jobs anyway, as India's manufacturing base is a tiny fraction of China's 100 million formal sector job base), and "Shining India" (the BJP's losing campaign mantra from 2004) is largely informal (shadow economy, or gray market) and the service sector accounts for roughly half of formal GDP, meaning India basically leapfrogs to services and never bothers (yet) to seriously build up manufacturing.