The Politics of Defining Poverty… Draft version for CPRC Conference 1| Page The Politics of Defining Poverty and Its Alleviation: questioning state strategies through grassroots voices in Kerala Dr Glyn Williams, Dr Binitha V Thampi, Prof D Narayana, Dr Sailaja Nandigama, Dr Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya Address for Correspondence: Dr Glyn Williams Department of Town & Regional Planning University of Sheffield Sheffield S10 1TN Email: glyn.williams@sheffield.ac.uk; Tel: +44 114 222 6179 Abstract Any attempt to define poverty, or to produce policy interventions for its alleviation, is necessarily both partial and political. The dominant mode of ‘seeing’ poverty currently adopted by the Indian state is that poverty pertains to households (or individuals), and can be captured by certain indicators whose presence (belonging to a Scheduled community) or absence (such as land ownership) is amenable to social verification. This is to some degree both innovative and progressive, in that it recognises the multi‐dimensional nature of poverty, and potentially democratises the process of labelling households as ‘BPL’ (below poverty line). It is, however, problematic in that it fails to recognise the relational nature of poverty, and also bolsters a set of poverty alleviation strategies that take ‘capacity impaired households’ as naturalised objects for intervention (c.f. Tilly, 2007). This paper uses evidence from two Districts in Kerala to question this current framing of poverty, and its alleviation through strategies important at the national level (the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) and within the State (Kudumbashree, Kerala’s innovative anti‐poverty mission, and its Ashraya programme for dealing with ‘destitute’ households). In doing so it draws on the perspectives of respondents traditionally seen as poor, such as landless labourers and Scheduled communities, and the ‘new’ poor, including farming households affected by the collapse of prices for Kerala’s key cash crops. The argument put forward here is that these programmes are well‐attuned to the local state’s own capacities for intervention, and put in play a particular mode of poverty alleviation which is potentially open to popular scrutiny and participation. What they ignore, however, is a deeper politics of the production of poverty, in which the local state is seen as helpless in the face of ‘market forces’ to address underlying issues around the production of secure livelihoods.