ABSTRACT
Why has the level of poverty not been curbed in rural areas of India? How does the rate of poverty rise over the years in rural areas despite even the soaring growth in agriculture? Why did the economic and welfare policies that aimed at curbing poverty almost fail to reduce the level of poverty in rural West Bengal? Keeping these questions in mind, I had embarked on my research since a couple of years ago. Again and again, particularly when I did visit the rural areas of West Bengal, these questions kept haunt me to uncover a fundamental reason for the persistence of poverty in rural areas. While the years passed, I figured out that the poverty was a discursive concept created by the government or, in other words, by the state that required managing or, in other words, ruling its subjects. Actually, the poor are poor as they are unemployed or underemployed. I quickly realized that we had to understand the causes of unemployment if we were really desirous of finding some measures to get rid of poverty in rural areas. I began to alter the entire perspective of my research and framed the aforesaid questions in a different manner. Why are the rural poor unemployed? Why did the economic transformations whatsoever fail to settle the problem of rural unemployment? Despite all the efforts on the part of the government, the Central and the state, why does the rate of unemployment rise in rural India and in West Bengal in particular? These inquiries brought me into a new hypothesis. I have revealed that unemployment, be it the rural or the urban, is a political process, and thus the eradication of unemployment must have its roots in politics of the victims of unemployment. The confluence of three stakeholders, i.e. the capital, the state, and the people, who being classified or stratified, as I argue, does create and recreate the dynamic occurrence of unemployment. This research thus reveals three key facts. First, the problem of poverty or well-being has to be understood mainly in terms of unemployment and underemployment. Second, the unemployment as a political process has to be studied from the perspective of emerging politics among different constituent groups of the said process. Third, the problem of unemployment and its solutions are actually a part of an interdisciplinary research agenda.
