ABSTRACT
Poverty and inequality are the two enduring colonial legacies in India, which we have inherited from British rule. Immediately after India's independence in 1947, India's first visionary prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted the basic principles of social democracy and a welfare state. This was exhibited through various social welfare policies and programmes, like, planned economic development, mixed economy model with emphasis on the public sector, bank nationalization, land reforms, democratic decentralization through Panchayati Raj, grassroots democracy, etc. These policies unleashed by Nehru continued even in the post-Nehruvian era. However, 1991 marked the year when there was a major policy shift in India's economic policy – a shift from a welfare state model to a laissez-faire and free market economy brought in through India's adoption of the policies of liberalization, privatization, and globalization. These policies brought in their wake an increase in poverty, socio-economic inequality, unemployment, hunger, malnutrition, etc. This chapter seeks to study the interfaces between poverty and inequality in India, which has only been aggravated through the policies of globalization. It also makes a modest attempt to understand the state and civil society's affirmative action and responses in dealing with these multifarious challenges facing India in contemporary times. It also studies how the coronavirus pandemic has aggravated the problems of poverty and inequality and what kind of responses have emerged from the Indian state and civil society to tackle the problems of marginalization. This chapter also substantiates the major findings of this study through various statistical facts and figures obtained from the United Nations Development Programme.
