To address the social impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the Government of India extended the scope and benefits of several existing social assistance programmes. This paper assesses who benefited, and to what extent, using administrative data from each of the main programmes included in the package. The analysis shows that implementation constraints, partial uptake, and substitution effects reduced the overall transfer of resources to households relative to budget allocations. There were also substantial disparities in the actual amounts transferred across states. Finally, a rural bias prevailed even though urban informal workers were probably the most affected by the COVID-19 crisis.
