The Making of Poverty

There is disquiet in India’s farmlands. From the agitated theatrics of Tamil Nadu farmers on the streets of New Delhi, to the agitations in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, to the rural farmlands of Nashik, Maharashtra, the anger, frustration and desperation of the farmers bring into sharp focus the state of India’s agrarian situation. Increasing debts, unremunerative prices, perilous credit relations, ill-founded policies like demonetisation, and, perhaps more crucially, the stark conditions of the rural agrarian population blighted by uneven relations of caste, class, poverty, gender, and marginal landholdings/landlessness, all intersect to produce immense inequalities and marginalisation, both materially and socially.

In May 2017, the New Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies released its third edition of the India Exclusion Report (IXR), 2016. In its scrutiny of four areas of public services—pension schemes, digital access, justice system and access to land—the report exposed stark exclusions on the basis of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion.