Title: An Ethnographic Investigation into the Persistence of Poverty amongst Adivasis and Dalits in India
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: In recent decades India has experienced exceptionally high economic growth rates, becoming one of the world's fastest growing major economies. Yet, the redistribution of the fruits of economic growth - the trickle down effects of growth - have been negligible for vast swathes of India's population, most of whom live in the countryside. The demographics of the poor are starkly socially marked. Economists tell us that India's dalit and adivasi communities, who account for almost 25% of the country's population and were historically seen as 'untouchable' and 'savage', suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty, remaining worse off than other groups almost everywhere across the country. But econometric analysis is unable to tell us how and why this is the case. This project consists of the following three components: 1) primary anthropological research to understand the processes by which poverty is reproduced through agrarian relations and the shift from farm-based social and economic hierarchies towards new forms of power and exploitation off the farm which lead to the persistence of dalit and adivasi marginalisation across India. 2) analytical development in the study of poverty and its persistence which, informed by recent statistical research and policy shifts at the national and state levels, crafts a more critical and powerful alternative to poverty measurements by ethnographically exploring the relationship between political and economic transformations in rural-based dalit and adivasi lives, and the transformations taking place at the macro level. Crucially this involves analytically establishing a research field which structures ethnography in the framework of political economic theory and brings this combination to the centre of understandings of poverty. 3) some of the first historically situated ethnographic studies which are comparative, not only in their regional distribution, but also in their underlying theoretical and methodological bases. The three cases - from central and eastern India - will be integrated at the level of planning, midterm goals and findings. Methodologically, the project will thus establish the value of an underdeveloped systematic ethnographic approach to poverty which will foreground the comparison of the consequences of rural political and economic transformation on dalit and adivasi lives across a number of different scales and settings in the most under-researched parts of the subcontinent. The results from such deep comparative ethnographic research will be of considerable value to policy makers, researchers, activists and the general public. Significantly, the research will inform the fields of poverty and development, agrarian transition, and anthropology in the region and beyond. Three monographs on each site, one co-authored thematically arranged book on adivasis and dalits, and at least at least four peer-reviewed journal articles are the expected academic and policy related outputs. These will be supplemented by a package for BBC Radio 4, and a photo exhibition for a general public.


Research activity codes: 1.4 METHODOLOGIES AND MEASUREMENTS;1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE