The Great Indian Poverty Debate

Hundreds of millions of Indians are poor by national and international standards. Indian policy making and politics are dominated by discussions of poverty, and measures of poverty rightly attract a great deal of attention and debate. In the second half of the 1990s, India’s GDP grew rapidly by historical standards, and many commentators have associated this acceleration with the process of economic reform that began in the 1990s. Yet the reforms themselves, and the limited opening of the Indian economy that they involved, remain controversial, as does their effect on poverty. This debate is far from unique to India. The worldwide controversy about globalization and its effects on poverty and inequality has followed much the same lines as the internal debate in India. And indeed, India accounts for about 20 per cent of the global count of those living on less than $1 a person per day, so that what happens in India is not only a reflection of worldwide trends, but one of their major determinants. This book brings together the key papers in the Indian poverty debate, together with a new introduction that provides an overview and synthesis. The collection also contains some seminal papers that link the current debates to the earlier literature, as well as discussions of the issues in other countries. Many of the papers in this volume were first presented in Delhi in January 2002 at a workshop jointly organized by the Planning Commission and the World Bank.