Challenging Inequalities: a Indo-European perspective The proposed research aims at appraising the inequalities in human condition that continue to blossom in our fast growing and increasingly globalized world, with a special focus on India and Europe. Europe and India are, in effect, two interesting environments in which to perform such an appraisal. Both are indeed major players in the globalized world to the production of which they contribute about 25%. Europe is made of mature economies with virtually zero extreme poverty (as defined by the income threshold of 1.7 US dollar a day in purchasing power parity) that exhibits modest yearly per capita growth and slow structural changes. India is by contrast a fast-growing developing country that concentrates one third of the world's extremely poor population and that is changing its social organization at an unprecedented pace. In so far as income and wealth inequality are concerned, the European countries are facing the challenge of sharing a mildly growing per capita GDP. By contrast, India faces the challenge of sharing the spectacular growth among the various segment of its population, including the extremely poor. But inequalities in income, consumption or wealth are by no means the only dimension by which individuals differ. Inequalities in variables such as health, education or access to decent housing are also extremely important in this perspective. So are the more subtle inequalities in social status, or the inequalities of opportunities that individuals coming from various groups are facing. Europe and India are interesting laboratories to analyze all these inequalities also because of the different attitude that their population seem to have with respect to these inequalities. The ethical acceptability of the different inequalities is an extremely important factor that seem to differ somewhat between India and Europe and, for that matter, even between European countries themselves. For example, there is a widespread view in European countries of protestant culture that income inequalities which result purely from a different exertion of effort are not ethically objectionable. This view seems to be less prevalent in countries of catholic culture. Similarly, India, with its still prevailing caste system, is often perceived as being more tolerant to inequalities in social status than Europe. The proposed research will make several contributions to our understanding of the inequalities in Europe in India. The first one will be to provide new tools for appraising some of these inequalities that are both easy to apply and based on clear ethical premises. Some of these tools concern inequalities in variables such as social status, education or access to a decent housing that can not be easily measured on a cardinal scale. For such variables, the conventional tools for measuring income or wealth inequalities can not be meaningfully applied. The research will also contribute to the design of tools for appraising inequalities in a multidimensional perspective that takes due account of the correlation that may exist between, say, income and health inequalities. As a last methodological contribution, the research will develop new criteria for appraising the inequality of opportunities between social groups. A second broad expected contribution of the research is to gather information about the individuals' attitudes to inequalities and to the policies used to reduce the adverse impact of these inequalities. This information will be collected by either questionnaire surveys or by experimental methods in which subjects are asked to take carefully designed decisions that reflect their attitude to inequalities. A third contribution of the research will be to evaluate some of the inequality-alleviating policies themselves. A last contribution of the research is to provide a more qualitative assessment of the impact of those inequalities on individual lives. A special focus will be put here on Nepal migrants and workers in large firms. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.