In rural Punjab the documents that determine a household's position are the jamabandi entry, the girdawari crop record, the ration card, the Aadhaar, the caste certificate and the bank passbook.
Whether a family can borrow, sell, inherit, claim compensation for a flood, get a scholarship or receive a pension depends on those, and on whether the names on them are spelt consistently.
Name spellings vary across documents constantly, because Punjabi names are transliterated differently by different clerks, and a mismatch can stop a payment for months.
The people worst affected are those with least: landless households, migrant workers, denotified communities and women, who are frequently not named on anything.
A great deal of what looks like poverty in rural Punjab is administratively produced: the entitlement exists and the paper does not match.
Nobody has studied this in Punjab specifically, and it is the most immediately fixable problem on this site.
The document is often not a document. A great deal of rural lending in Punjab runs on entries in the lender's own book and on a signed blank paper held as security.
The blank paper is the dangerous part. It can be filled in for any amount and is enforceable in a way the borrower cannot contest, and the practice appears in every study of rural debt in the state.
Land is the collateral behind almost all of it, which is why the debt question and the land question in Punjab are the same question.