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.

Poverty in India is intimately connected with caste, untouchability, colonialism and indentured servitude, inseparable from the international experience of slavery and race. Focusing on historical and modern practices, this book goes beyond traditional economic approaches to poverty and demonstrates its genesis in exclusion, isolation, domination and extraction resulting in the removal of human and economic rights. Examining cash and asset transfers, as well as the enhancement of women's rights, primary health and education, it scrutinizes inadequacies in compensatory policies for redressing the balance. This is an original interdisciplinary contribution that offers bold domestic and international policies anchored in human radicalism to eradicate poverty.

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

The studies of poverty, progress and development in this volume, first published in 1991, by a distinguished international roster of authors and researchers, aim to increase knowledge of the social mechanisms of pauperization, marginalization, and the exclusion of certain categories of society; to bring to light the potential and creative role of socio-cultural, intellectual, ethical, moral and spiritual values in progress and the development process; and to examine the links and contradictions between development and progress in order to propose ways of reducing social inequalities.