Reducing poverty and raising rural and urban living standards remains central to India's development concerns. Decentralization in all its forms – deconcentration, delegation, devolution – has been one of the strategies that India has followed to promote development at the local level, hoping to bring the state closer to the citizen and thereby making it more accountable. The 1992 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution promised decentralized rural governance through Panchayati Raj and, as a result, improved rural service delivery. Over two decades later, what does India have to show? Have rural outcomes, particularly for poor people, actually improved? Are empowerment and accountability higher? This extremely timely NCAER book attempts to explore the what, how, and why of the outcomes associated with rural decentralization as they relate to empowerment, service delivery and the welfare of rural households, particularly poor and marginalized ones.

This book is the culmination of an intense, nearly six-year research effort at NCAER, the National Council of Applied Economic Research, led by its Senior Fellow Dr Hari K Nagarajan and his team. The work has been built on a unique dataset, India's only long-standing national longitudinal panel, the NCAER Additional Rural Income Survey/Rural Demographic and Economic Survey (ARIS/REDS), which goes back to 1968. Dr Nagarajan also led the field work and survey team that collected the last REDS round in 2006. I am extremely grateful to Dr Nagarajan for his commitment to this important research effort at NCAER even as he has now left NCAER.

It is entirely appropriate that this work was done at NCAER, which was established in 1956 as part of Prime Minister Nehru's vision for independent institutions that a newly independent India needed. It is the nation's oldest and largest independent, economic think-tank, informing policy choices for both government and industry. For nearly six decades, NCAER has served the nation with its rich offering of research, data, and policy analysis to central and state governments, corporate India, the media and informed citizens. It is one of a few think-tanks globally that combine analysis and policy outreach with deep data collection capacity, particularly for large-scale household and consumer surveys.