MovingOut of Poverty (Volume 3): The Promise of Empowerment and Democracy in India

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India has achieved unprecedented growth rates in the last decade, yet not all of this economic growth was pro-poor or equally distributed: While poverty alleviation was possible in certain places, the overall status of the poor did not improve or even got worse. Moving Out of Poverty: The Promise of Empowerment and Democracy in India presents the experiences of poor people from the bottom-up in a country that still has the largest number of absolute poor in the world. By particularly focusing on 300 rural villages across the four states of Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Assam, the authors analyze the role of diverse economic and non-economic local institutions in mediating the set of opportunities available to the poor, in addition to underpinning the relationship between mobility and social differences based on caste, religion and ethnicity. The book also pushes the analysis further down to the level of the individuals and utilizes a detailed coding of 2,700 open-ended life stories, exploring the important roles of self-agency, institutions, and idiosyncratic shocks in triggering asset accumulation and depletion that define the poor s ability to move out of poverty. The policy-oriented approach in relation to state-specific issues is not only an invaluable resource for policymakers and practitioners in these four states of India, but also an epitomized case-study that provides the reader with deep insights regarding poor people s experiences and the political economy of poverty alleviation.