Income dynamics and schooling investments in Tamil Nadu, India, 1971–2003: Changing roles of land and human capital

Aggregate national-level statistics in India showed a steady decline in poverty from about 50 percent in the early 1970s to about 30 percent in the late 1990s in terms of the head-count index (Datt and Ravallion 2002). However, the number of poor remains appreciably high in India. An estimation by Chen and Ravallion (2004) shows that about one-third of the poor in the world in 2001 lived in India.1 A clear message from this fact is that without India’s further success, progress in poverty alleviation to the level mentioned in the Millennium Development Goals is not possible.