A researcher from the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) and a TCI-supported graduate student were awarded a grant from the Polson Institute for Global Development to study the impact of reforms designed to help migrants access benefits from India’s national food-based safety net program.

TCI research associate Raghav Puri and TCI Scholar Bharath Chandran were granted funding for their research project, “Portable Food Transfers for Migrant Populations: Insights from India’s National Food-Based Safety Net Program.” Puri and Chandran will assess the effectiveness of portability in improving the food security of Indian migrants receiving food-based benefits from India’s Public Distribution System (PDS). As part of their study, they will analyze administrative data and interview PDS beneficiaries.

 “This grant will allow us to better understand our quantitative findings from administrative data by speaking with administrators and users of portability in the PDS,” Puri said. “We hope insights from our study can help improve the implementation of portability in states with a high number of migrants but low use of portability.”

The PDS provides 5 kilograms of free food grain to over 800 million individuals every month. Until the recent introduction of portable benefits, PDS beneficiaries could only collect food grain from specific shops to which they were assigned. This posed a problem for migrant households, who were unable to access their benefits when away from their assigned shops. In 2019, the Indian government implemented the “One Nation, One Ration Card (ONORC) program to enable interstate portability of benefits. By 2023, most states had implemented ONORC.

In addition to using the grant for conducting interviews, Puri and Chandran also plan to conduct workshops on ONORC with staff of community-based organizations working with migrants.

Puri has previously studied the PDS at TCI, focusing on measuring the “true cost” of the program by accounting for hidden costs, such as environmental impacts, and modeling the effect of cost-saving reforms. He is currently co-authoring a book on the PDS with TCI Director Prabhu Pingali.

The research project was one of 11 funded by the Polson Institute in its spring 2025 grant cycle. Part of Cornell’s Department of Global Development, the Polson Institute supports theoretical and applied social science research at the intersection of systemic inequality, social and environmental justice, with a focus on the advancement of global development as a critical, innovative and participatory practice. 

“Never has support for development been more pressing than now,” Polson Institute Director Mildred Warner said in a news release.  “Global Development faculty and students are at the forefront of new techniques and approaches to addressing critical agriculture and development topics,” she said. 

Featured image: Raghav Puri (left) at a PDS shop in Mumbai, India. (Photo provided)