Paper short abstract:

This paper is an attempt to identify the differences in the causes of urban poverty, the nature of social exclusion due to that poverty and the responses from the state to alleviate that poverty in the cities of Adelaide and Kolkata and to assess that on a comparative perspective.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the sincerest attempt, it is very difficult to measure the actual dimension of poverty in any country. This is so because of a growing consensus that the poverty indexes are not only many like income,¬¬ capability, human goals on life style and so on, but also important is "the choice of space and that of measure (which) tallies with motivation that makes us interested in evaluating inequality and poverty in the first place" (Sen, 2006, pp. 32 - 33). Nevertheless the fact remains that urban poverty remains high both in developed as well as undeveloped countries. But the causes of that urban poverty, the nature of social exclusion and the responses from the state to alleviate that poverty, differ from developed countries to developing ones. For example, even when migration remains the cause of urban poverty, the causes of migration to the cities differ substantially. This paper is an attempt to identify those points from a comparative perspective on the basis of the ethnographic study of the urban poor of Playford and Salisbury in Adelaide, made during the Endeavour Post Doctoral research [26.10.2009 - 25.02.2010] and that in Kolkata being done currently. The target group of the study in Kolkata is slum-dwellers of Kolkata Municipal Corporation.