Indonesia mailed Raskin beneficiaries their entitlements and lifted rice deliveries 26%

Indonesia's Raskin program, built after the Asian financial crisis, shipped subsidized rice to the poorest households: 15 kg a month at roughly 15 cents a kilo, about a fifth of market price. It cost $1.5 billion a year, yet less than half the rice reached the intended kitchens. Local officials re-allocated to households not on the poverty rolls and reset the subsidy price — and relied on recipients not knowing the rules; the price had sat unchanged for seven years, yet many beneficiaries didn't know it.

From 2012, MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee, Benjamin Olken and colleagues tested fixes across 572 villages. The winning intervention was almost embarrassingly cheap: mail hundreds of thousands of personalized postcards — you are eligible, this is your monthly quota, this is what you pay — and post flyers in each village listing who is eligible. In the 378 villages that got cards, eligible households received 26 percent more rice than control villages.

The concept the authors invoke is 'common knowledge': the card turns a private plea into a public claim — I know I'm eligible, and I know you know it. The analysis was published in the Journal of Political Economy, and Indonesia took the idea national. In 2015 the government issued credit-card-sized Social Protection Cards (Kartu Pelindungan Social) stating benefits to more than 15 million Indonesians, extending the approach beyond rice to school subsidies and temporary cash transfers.

Mail the poor written proof of their entitlement — common knowledge is bargaining power

The leak was bargaining, not logistics: officials held a monopoly on program rules, so warehouse controls treated the wrong disease.

A personalized card converts an entitlement from something to petition for into something to demand — and public flyers make the demand socially safe.

The fix costs postage, applies to any program with defined benefits, and was measured against control villages instead of anecdotes.

Corruption hides in private information more than in weak controls. Give every claimant a copy of the rules and enforcement happens peer-to-peer, at no cost.

Indonesia expanded the eligibility card into the 2015 Kartu Pelindungan Social, reaching more than 15 million people across rice, school subsidies and cash transfers. The Raskin result became a standard citation for information-based anti-corruption in development economics — Banerjee's own summary: it isn't rocket science.