Every year, between the planting and the harvest, a period of acute poverty hits rural households in South Asia. The crops are in the ground but not yet ready. There is no farm work. The family eats less, borrows more, pulls children from school. Development economists call this the “lean season.” The families living through it call it hunger.
In many of these households, seasonal migration to nearby cities would solve the problem. Construction sites, rickshaw pulling, domestic work — the urban labour market has demand. The family knows this. The city is a bus ride away. But the bus fare, plus the first few days of meals before the first wage arrives, is a barrier the household cannot finance from savings that do not exist.
This is the problem the programme was designed to test.
The intervention
The design was simple. Provide a small travel subsidy — enough to cover the bus fare and a few days of meals — to randomly selected households during the lean season. The subsidy was not a gift; it was a nudge past a liquidity constraint. The hypothesis: if the barrier is the fare, removing the fare unlocks the migration, and the migration produces wages and remittances that more than repay the subsidy cost.
The programme was designed with development economists and tested as a randomised controlled trial across multiple countries — Bangladesh initially, then adapted for India and other contexts. The randomisation was at the household level, with treatment and control groups drawn from the same villages.
What the data showed
The results were striking. Households that received the travel subsidy were significantly more likely to send a migrant to the city during the lean season. The migrants earned wages. They sent money home. Household consumption — the standard proxy for welfare — increased measurably during the hungry months.
The cost-effectiveness was remarkable. The subsidy was small (roughly the cost of a bus ticket plus a few days of food). The return — in terms of increased household consumption — was a multiple of the subsidy amount. By the standards of development interventions, this was one of the highest-return programmes ever tested.
Perhaps most importantly, the effect persisted. Some households that received the subsidy in year one continued to migrate in subsequent years even without the subsidy. The first trip broke the inertia. Once a household knew the route, knew where to find work, and had a contact in the city, the migration became self-sustaining.
The politics of a bus ticket
The intervention raises a question that development economics does not always ask loudly enough: if the solution to seasonal hunger is a bus ticket, why does seasonal hunger persist?
The answer is structural. Rural households in seasonal poverty lack the savings, the credit access, and sometimes the information networks to finance even a short-term migration. Microfinance products are designed for enterprise lending, not for covering a bus fare. Government welfare programmes operate on annual cycles, not seasonal ones. The gap between the planting and the harvest is a gap in the institutional architecture of poverty alleviation.
The programme showed that the gap can be bridged cheaply and effectively. The question that follows — why it has not been bridged at scale — is a political one, not an economic one. The evidence is there. The cost is low. The returns are high. What is missing is the policy decision to act on it.
Where this sits
We were involved in the programme design and operational implementation. The experience shaped how we think about two things: the importance of testing simple ideas rigorously (a bus ticket is not a complex intervention, but the RCT was necessary to prove the case), and the frustration of watching strong evidence sit unused because the policy window never opens.
The Measurement Checklist asks: “Who will act on this report?” For this programme, the evidence was compelling. The actor — a government willing to fund seasonal migration subsidies at scale — has been slower to arrive than the evidence deserved.