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The government is working on a radical recast of its rural social assistance programmes that involves a new definition of poverty, a social registry to identify individual beneficiaries, a new template for allocation of resources, and greater power to panchayats in terms of both spending funds and monitoring the schemes. The current annual budget for various government programmes targeting rural India is around Rs2.5-3 trillion. The immediate aim of the exercise is to move 10 million households across 50,000 panchayats out of poverty by 2019. The recast will overhaul the spending pattern of the Union government and possibly state governments too and has the potential to change the entire political economy of developmental expenditure.