Poverty And Social Exclusion In India

Despite India’s record of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction over recent decades, rising inequality in the country has been a subject of concern among policy makers, academics, and activists alike. Poverty and Social Exclusion in India focuses on social exclusion, which has its roots in India’s historical divisions along lines of caste, tribe, and the excluded sex, that is, women. These inequalities are more structural in nature and have kept entire groups trapped, unable to take advantage of opportunities that economic growth offers. Culturally rooted systems perpetuate inequality, and, rather than a culture of poverty that afflicts disadvantaged groups, it is, in fact, these inequality traps that prevent these groups from breaking out. Combining rigorous quantitative research with a discussion of these underlying processes, this book finds that exclusion can be explained by inequality in opportunities, inequality in access to markets, and inequality in voice and agency. This report will be of interest to policy makers, development practitioners, social scientists, and academics working to foster equality in India.

It has been more than two decades since India embraced open market policies in the effort to align itself with the globalized world economy. The outcome has been quite significant in ushering high GDP growth, coupled with a gradual, but definite, shift from a predominantly agrarian economy to a service-led industrial economy. However, it has become increasingly clear that this unprecedented growth story is not illuminating the lives of the bulk of India's population and has actually exacerbated the divide between the haves and the have-nots, threatening social anarchy in the near future if the trend is not addressed immediately. Lack of quality education, basic facilities, suitable infrastructure, and abysmal penetration of basic banking services are identified to be some of the biggest impediments in this journey. Policy planners today are unanimous in their argument that unless this growth is made socially inclusive, the scourge of poverty will seriously threaten the sustainability of holistic development or social self-sufficiency for teeming millions in the country. Fortunately, government initiatives wield much needed hope in this battle for securing social and financial equality. The high correlation between social exclusion and poverty should be adequately represented at the highest policy making level and propel the right action plan in the near to the long term. This book examines the macro to micro views on poverty and social exclusion issues in India.

The report's main objective is to track development outcomes for three select groups - scheduled tribes (STs), scheduled castes (SCs), and women - that have traditionally faced exclusion in India. It asks the question: how did these groups fare over a period of rapid growth in India, primarily in the nineties; and were they able to break through the historically grounded inequalities that have kept entire generations among them trapped or did traps trump opportunities? It focuses on exclusion along three spheres - services, markets, and voice and agency. Within these too, the attempt is to highlight a few select issues that offer new insights. The report draws both on national data (national sample surveys (NSS) and national family health surveys (NFHS)) as well as qualitative work for its evidence, relying more on the latter to probe heterogeneity within states and groups and incipient processes that result in exclusion.

"Identifies and examines various trajectories of exclusion at both macro and micro levels in India"--

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Economics - Case Scenarios, grade: 1,0, University of Linz, course: Armut und soziale Ausgrenzung, language: English, abstract: Poverty was and remains among the gravest and most intractable problems worldwide. While still being a matter of concern for most governments, this issue is of paramount importance for developing countries, where most of the world's impoverished live, and where a large proportion of the population suffers severe and often multi-dimensional deprivations. The incidence of poverty varies greatly between countries and regions, but generally South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the regions most plagued both in terms of severity and proportion of the population affected. According to statistics a fifth of all people on earth live on less than $1 a day, and almost half of them are in South Asia.1 India, being a part of one of the most poverty-stricken regions of the world, is not spared the fate of its neighbours. Estimates of the number of people below the poverty line vary between 260 and 400 million, making India the country with the largest number of poor people in the world. For most of them poverty is both severe and prolonged. Many spend the better part of their lives impoverished, and some even die without ever knowing the delights of financial security, having suffered deprivations in all aspects of their existence all life long.

This book honors the memory of Tony Atkinson, who made significant contributions to the rigorous study of income inequality, poverty, and redistribution. These essays presented, covering a span of over 30 years of research and scholarship, have been at the forefront of distributional analysis, and many of them are of prime importance for contemporary developments in the real-valued measurement of poverty and inequality, with particular reference to the concepts of fuzzy poverty assessment, vulnerability, heterogeneity/multidimensionality, unit consistency, sub-group decomposability, and dominance criteria. While all of these articles have been previously published—singly or with co-authorship—in a number of professional journals or distinguished edited volumes, this book is greatly enriched by a substantial introductions by the authors, which place the contributions in context, highlights their inter-connectedness, and relates them to the work of Tony Atkinson and other scholars. This book is of intrinsic value to welfare analysts, as well as being a tribute to a very great scholar by a fellow economist.