Inclusive growth needs to be achieved to reduce poverty and other disparities and raise economic growth. This book develops a poverty profile for India in view of the ongoing national and global efforts toward ensuring inclusive growth and bringing poverty levels down. This poverty profile will enable academics and policy makers to reassess and improve on the existing methodologies in estimating poverty rates, evaluate the effectiveness of existing poverty programs, and suggest alternative and complementary options for strategic intervention based on the lessons drawn from program implementation both at the state and national levels.

The book examines India s experience with poverty reduction in a period of rapid economic growth. Marshalling evidence from multiple sources of survey data and drawing on new methods, the book asks how India s structural transformation - from rural to urban, and from agriculture to nonfarm sectors - is impacting poverty. Our analysis suggests that since the early 1990s, urban growth has emerged as a much more important driver of poverty reduction than in the past. We focus in particular on the role of small and medium size conurbations in India, both as the urban sub-sector in which urban poverty is overwhelmingly concentrated, and as a sub-sector that could potentially stimulate rural-based poverty reduction. Second, in rural areas, we focus on the nature of intersectoral transformation out of agriculture into the nonfarm economy. Stagnation in agriculture has been accompanied by dynamism in the nonfarm sector, but there is much debate about whether the growth seen has been a symptom of agrarian distress or a source of poverty reduction. Finally, alongside the accelerating economic growth and the highly visible transformation that is occurring in India s major cities, inequality is on the rise. This is raising concern that economic growth in India has by-passed significant segments of the population. The third theme on social exclusion asks if, despite the dramatic growth, historically grounded inequalities along lines of caste, tribe and gender have persisted. This book would be of interest for policymakers, researchers, non-governmental organizations, and international agencies from India and abroad--who wish to know more about India s experience of the last two decades in reducing poverty.

What distinguishes Persistence of Poverty from most other poverty studies is the way in which it conceptualises the problem. This volume offers a variety of alternative analytical perspectives and fresh insights into poverty that are key to addressing the problem. In looking at the day to day lived realities of the poor the volume points out that in order to understand poverty one must take into account the wider system of class and power relations in which it is rooted. This volume suggests that ‘democracy in India may be as big a part of the problem as it is of the solution.’

Growth (trickle- down) and poverty alleviation (pull- up) programs are not substitutes for each other, but complements, the Indian data on poverty show.

The pioneering work of Dadabhai Naoroji has two major aspects- economic and political - and provides valuable material for the economic and constitutional history of India.

This thoughtful and challenging book affords an alternative vision of India's rise in the world.