The paper will cover the recent social policy innovations in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan which are a variety of schemes of social assistance for poorer sections of the society and most often target the rural population. They are secondly destined to deliver a kind of rights-based support, thereby avoiding former administrative discretion (with the aim to improve targeting and avoid corrupt practices.). interestingly, these programs were introduced by nearly all South asian countries at more or less the same time. This can either mean that regional diffusion effects were quite strong and/or that donors exported some kind of social blueprint.
