The Persistence of Poverty in India

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.’

Nandini Gooptu is Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and currently Head of the Department of International Development at Oxford University. She is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India (Cambridge  University Press, 2001) and several highly acclaimed edited volumes.                                 

Jonathan Parry is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Caste and Kinship in Kangra (Routledge  1979), Death in Banaras (Cambridge  University Press, 1994), and several distinguished edited volumes.