The recent round of poverty estimates, placing Orissa as the poorest state in India, has pressed an alarm bell among planners, practitioners and also international donors. This, in turn, has triggered a sense of urgency for salvaging the situation of chronic poverty, where the central thrust is...

The structuralist perspective envisages poverty, especially in rural India, as a long duration phenomenon. Over time, most of the structural features of poverty have remained more or less intact. As a result, a large proportion of the poor in India are also chronically poor in terms of duration...