ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the hypothetical and empirical context for explaining why the issues of employment and unemployment should be the appropriate prism to understand the status of well-being of a population. It explains the way the poverty vis-a-vis unemployment is going to be created and recreated in different regimes as simple consequences of complex relationship between capital, class and the state in rural West Bengal, India. The historical trajectory of the early period of colonialism in India explicates about how unemployment and poverty had been constructed due not to the individuals' lack in their capabilities but to 'the wider system of class and power relations'. The Nehru-led government of independent India first took an urgent attempt to enact the land reform laws in line of instructions that scripted for colonial interest by Floud Commission. On the basis of this enactment, West Bengal did subsequently reform their own land policies. The chapter also presents an overview of this book.
