ABSTRACT
Despite the rapid progress Karnataka has made over the years as one of the fastest growing states in the country, the progress is yet to trickle down to the rural areas. In this chapter an attempt has been made to document the status of poverty in rural Karnataka and study the temporal changes. The inequality in rural incomes has also been studied. The relationship between rural poverty and income has been analysed using the Kuznets framework. The districts with the highest incidence of poverty were Chitradurga, Gulbarga, and Bagalkote while Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, and Kodagu scored high on income and on reduced poverty. One heartening feature was that the degree of poverty had improved in all districts except in Vijayapura over the years under study.
