Overview
As India aspires to achieve its Viksit Bharat goals by 2045, millions in rural areas remain excluded from basic opportunities. While urban areas are witnessing rapid development and technological advancement, rural India continues to face challenges like poverty, poor infrastructure, limited access to quality education and healthcare, and ongoing agrarian distress — a stark reminder of Amartya Sen’s definition of poverty as “deprivation of basic capabilities“—the ability to live a life one has reason to value. Yet, poverty is still largely viewed through the narrow lens of “low levels of income”, making it the preferred criterion for its identification.
In the rural landscapes of India, far from the reach of connectivity and opportunity, persists a painful truth – “ultra-poverty. It is not just economic deprivation but a more entrenched one that affects people’s agency to escape it. Who are the ones caught in this trap, and why have conventional poverty alleviation models failed to break this cycle?
Though the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remain a global priority, the World Bank estimates that one in ten people around the world still live in extreme poverty. (The international poverty line is set at $2.15 per person per day, adjusted for purchasing power parity.)