Escaping Poverty? Rural Poverty Dynamics under a Bundled Agricultural Intervention in Tribal Communities

Chronic poverty among the most marginalized rural households is often attributed to structural poverty traps that large, one-off “big push”interventions are meant to overcome. We evaluate the Odisha PVTG Empowerment and Livelihoods Improvement Programme (OPELIP), a bundled agricultural “cargo-net” intervention targeting Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in eastern India, using a three-wave household panel with a matched quasi-experimental control group. We combine difference-in-differences estimation with transition-matrix analysis to test whether the program shifted well-being dynamics across four dimensions: consumption, assets, multidimensional poverty, and income. The program raised household consumption by approximately 13-14 percent in the short run and lowered households’ probability of falling into asset poverty, but these effects are concentrated in the early post-program period and do not extend to the asset index or the multidimensional poverty index. Multidimensional poverty remains highly chronic and equally persistent across treatment and control households. The results suggest that, over this horizon, OPELIP operated more as a consumption-supporting safety net than as a cargo-net capable of moving households out of structural, multidimensional poverty traps, underscoring the value of multidimensional assessment in evaluating large-scale rural development programs.