Assessing poverty and poverty alleviation: evidence from West Bengal

Recent interest in poverty and poverty relief has included debates that have moved beyond narrow concerns of consumption and income generation. Sen's research on entitlements and capabilities revolutionized approaches to poverty in the 1980s, and his work has itself been open to critical appraisals that have stressed empowerment and vulnerability as issues of equal importance. Some of these theoretical debates are briefly reviewed here, after which the frameworks for analysis that they suggest are applied to the study of rural poverty in West Bengal. The two tasks that the paper then sets itself are to illustrate the empirical value of broader conceptualizations of poverty, and to highlight the methodological difficulties that they raise.