Draft paper for Manchester conference on Chronic Poverty, April 2003, session 'Social Exclusion, Rights and Chronic Poverty'

As indicated in writings of a couple of years back, the concept of social exclusion provided two promises. First, it would emphasise the multi-dimensionality of poverty, something that in the international debate anyway has become generally recognised. Second, it would focus on the processes that contribute to deprivation; this may be more crucial as much poverty research still does not bridge the gap between describing and explaining poverty. This paper elaborates on these two issues, arguing that it is a helpful concept to further our understanding of poverty, and proposes to apply the relatively new concept of social exclusion to provide better insight into the dimensions and causes of poverty in one of India’s poorest regions. It looks in particular at the inter-relation and overlap of economic factors, human development and social identity as elements of deprivation, and the institutional and cultural factors that have caused and maintain this complexity of deprivation.