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This paper critiques the poverty scorecard (PSC), a monetary-based tool for measuring poverty that has been adopted by community development programmes and participatory non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in 66 countries including Pakistan. Drawing on 15 interviews and five focus group discussions conducted with the staff members and community members of Frontier Organization for Rural Development, a participatory NGO in Pakistan, I argue that it uses clouds intra-household power and resources distribution thereby furthering gender, class, and ethnic inequalities. Instead of solely relying on the PSC, the paper suggests supplementing it with participatory methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to analyze poverty issues in rural households of India sampled purposively from the perspective of per capita Monthly Consumption Expenditure. In addition, the decomposition of poverty across social group affiliation and economic status adds another flavor to this study. The study concentrates on one of the backward areas of West Bengal, the district of Purulia, a resource-poor district with a distinct presence of scheduled social group population. The candidate villages were selected purposively keeping in mind the aspects of physical isolation and socio-economic stagnancy. Quantitative tools like Stepwise Multiple Regression and Decomposition analysis by FGT indices were instrumental in estimating the relative strengths of the factors affecting poverty. Besides, the study has simultaneously added the life history approach to integrate the QUAN-QUAL methods with an aim to produce a more complete picture. The critical findings include that the scheduled social groups, especially tribes, and daily wage casual laborers followed by agricultural laborers, were identified as the most vulnerable to poverty indicators in their respective population segments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers gendered accounts of girls' schooling and childhood from urban India. It challenges global 'girl effect' narratives by grappling with the interplay of poverty and caste patriarchy and how it shapes families' struggles and concerns and girls' (re)productive labour, (un)freedoms and classroom experiences. Moving beyond the notion of 'multiple childhoods' it develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the way the state, the market, economic inequalities and local patriarchies inscribe poor girls' schooling and work. Drawing upon ethnographic work with Class VIII students in a state school it also unpacks girls' negotiation of classed and casted patriarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural households continuously move into and out of poverty due to various factors; and in response to this phenomenon, these rural households adopt several strategies. The purpose of the present paper was to examine the role of livelihood diversification and social capital in the movement of these households into and out of poverty in Eastern rural India. The present study classified households into four poverty groups (called poverty dynamics) based on the panel data gathered from 1353 rural households between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. The study used the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) and the multinomial logit model (MLM) to examine the poverty outcome between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. As per the data collected, at the state level, 25.26% of households were chronic poor and 37.04% of households ascended out of poverty, while 8.20% of households descended into poverty between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. Further, it was found out from the SLA that there is a positive relationship between the phenomena of non-farm activities and escaping poverty. The result from the MLM shows that social capital in the form of group membership in different saving schemes and social groups helps to ascend out of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The workfare scheme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), and the direct food subsidy programme, the Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TPDS), represent two social safety nets instituted in India as anti-poverty measures. This paper examines whether from the point of view of individual households the two programmes are substitutes or complements, as this will shed light on the appropriateness of the design of the two programmes. Based on primary household data collected for the Indian states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (MP), we show that, in Rajasthan, a large percentage of households consider TPDS and NREGS programmes to be substitutes for each other, while in MP the households often perceive the two programmes as complements. Thus it appears that the two programmes are better designed in MP since an incentive for participation in one programme has desirable side effects on participation in the other. Correlates of participation in the two states are identified and the paper advances several policy conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concepts of poverty and development have many meanings in contemporary globalized societies. Development by definition implies desired changes in terms of livelihood, improved quality of life and better access to assets and services, etc. However in reality development programmes sometimes have negative consequences, perhaps unintended, multiplying the acute scarcity of resources and opportunities, or reproducing poverty. Also, the consequences of developmental programmes often appear to be out of focus, and seen at the ground level, there seems to be a gap between what is intended and what is actualized. In this framework, this paper presents a case study of the social, cultural and economic correlates of the development processes in Adadakulapalle, a settlement of Sugali peoples, once a semi-nomadic tribe, in Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh, South India. The paper shows how factionalism and faction politics affect the implementation of development interventions. It also looks at the poverty in the settlement and focuses on the types of change that people have experienced with the implementation of different schemes by both government and other agencies. The type of change is discussed in the present study through the macro and micro analysis of development programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citizenship is essentially about membership in society which enables citizens to participate in the affairs of their community on roughly equal terms and culturally enjoins upon them to collectively surmount their commonly felt problems, such as poverty. The role of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) should be understood in this context. Through observation and conversation-analysis methods, this paper studies two SHGs in India: the successful one practiced citizenship, envisaged a sense of community and made progress towards capacity building and empowerment, especially pertaining to education, health and sanitation. It concludes that in developing countries, citizens acquire the appropriate virtues through participation in the programmes linked with their vision of well-being and thus strengthen the cause of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]