Urban poverty beyond ‘slums’: mapping its multidimensionality

ABSTRACT

Indian urban poverty research identifies slums as pockets of poverty, but official sources in developing countries typically underestimate poverty in and overlook poverty outside slum areas. In this research, deprived areas of Bengaluru outside of officially recognised slums are identified. An Index of Multiple Deprivation (in human, financial and physical capital) is estimated and mapped at the ward level. The research finds that deprivations are mainly concentrated in the city’s periphery and that human capital deprivation is a more serious driver of poverty than financial crunch. While the spatial mapping exercise in the paper has been adapted to Bengaluru, the theoretical contribution to urban and regional studies we make is the promotion of ‘people-based policies’. We argue that, irrespective of where the poor live, assistance should be provided based on measures of capital deprivations. Such analysis will help people-based approaches to eradicate poverty.

KEYWORDS:

• Multidimensional poverty
• urban poverty–Bengaluru
• index of multiple deprivations
• poverty map–Bengaluru
• capital deprivations–Bengaluru

JEL:

• O18
• R23
• R28

Acknowledgements

We would like to express sincere gratitude towards ISEC, Bengaluru for providing the academic environment and ICSSR and UGC-MANF for awarding scholarships to conduct this PhD research work. We would specially thank doctoral committee members Prof. M. V. Nadkarni, Prof. D. Rajasekhar and Prof. N. Sivanna as well as Dr. S. Manasi and Ms. B. P. Vani for providing their invaluable guidance, comments and suggestions. We would like to thank Dr. Shivakumar for his help in GIS mapping. We thank the anonymous referee and the Editors, especially Prof Mick Dunford, for their comments which have improved the paper significantly. Any errors remain ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Conventionally, human capital deprivation is measured by educational attainment and health indicators. But an illiterate person who is earning decent money through actual work should be considered as possessing working capital, while people aged 18–59 not participating in the workforce, are dependent on other household members and are considered to not possess effective human capital.

2. One could argue that the scenarios ‘equal weights’ and ‘no weights’ would yield the same results. However, it should be noted that with ‘no weights’, the results will favour physical (due to the highest number of variables) over human and financial capital deprivation, as discussed above. With ‘equal weights’ all capitals receive equal weightage, as opposed to the ‘no weights’ scenario.

3. At the time this paper was completed, a delimitation exercise was conducted, as part of which the city was subdivided into many more wards. However, the analyses in this paper are limited to the erstwhile 198 wards only, given the availability of data for these wards in the Census of India 2011.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research; University Grants Commission-MANF.