From Poverty to Wellbeing: Alternative Approaches to the Recognition of Child Deprivation in India

Ways of seeing influence ways of doing; so there is much to be gained potentially by a thorough stock-taking and interrogation of the habitual methods and techniques employed in the field of child poverty measurement in India. The basic argument of this paper is that a paradigm shift is urgently necessary: from the mainstream approach which tends to focus overwhelmingly on the material poverty and deprivation experienced by some children, deemed by definition to be those in households-in-poverty, to one that widens the field of vision to include both material and non-material dimensions of wellbeing of all children. Such a shift carries significant implications for modes of conceptualization and recognition; for the focus and substantive content of analysis, for the choice of methods and tools, for the framing and design of policies and interventions, and more generally for the scope of debates and discourse pertaining to the development rights of children.