Anirudh Krishna
Biographic Data
| ID | 3696425 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anirudh Krishna |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anirudh |
| FAMILY NAME | Krishna |
| SIGNATURE | KRISHNA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6178-0192 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 362 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
How to Address the Roots of Gen Z Frustration
Youth protests that have toppled governments and brought life to a standstill in countries in South Asia and beyond are united not only by visible symbols, notably a Jolly Roger flag from a Japanese anime, but by a common underlying logic. These countries tend to share three key elements: low social mobility, poor-quality employment, and deficits in citizenship and planning. Protests will keep arising until these elements have been effectively ad…
What do communities feel about community-driven development? Learning from investigations in rural Malawi
Will AI Slay the Poverty Dragon
The rise of artificial intelligence and other new technologies has raised hopes that they might contribute to reducing poverty. History suggests that they need to be embedded in broader frameworks of institutions, regulations, and training
The impact of Covid-19 on household poverty: Examining impacts and resilience in a 40-year timeframe in rural Rajasthan (India)
To what extent has chronic poverty increased during the pandemic? In July and August 2021, we revisited seven villages of southern Rajasthan (India), where we had studied household poverty dynamics in 2002. We find that in the two decades before the pandemic (2002–2020), people’s structural positions improved vastly, chronic poverty fell from nearly half to less than 20% of households. These gains in resilience helped people cope with the pandemi…
A Range of Informality Across Cities and Slums: Understanding Precarity in Patna’s Slums Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article proposes a framework for understanding why slum residents are particularly vulnerable to economic downturns. We centre evidence from Bihar’s capital city, Patna, to examine how downturns are experienced more severely in some cities and slums than others. We argue slums are zones of pervasive informality, remaining largely disconnected from formal institutions and dependent on discretionary supports. But the extent of informality, and…
Social Mobility in Developing Countries: Concepts, Methods, and Determinants
Social mobility is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social mobility, but there is broad agreement that people should have roughly equal chances of success regardless of their economic status at birth. Concerns about rising inequality have engendered a renewed interest in social mobility—especially in the developing world. However, efforts to construct the databases a…
A threat to life and livelihoods: Examining the effects of the first wave of Covid-19 on health and wellbeing in Bengaluru and Patna slums
Taking advantage of our existing dataset of 6,721 slum households in two Indian cities, we undertook six rounds of follow-up phone interviews on the impact of COVID-19 between July and November 2020 with three key informants in each of 40 diverse slums. These cities showed contrasting health effects resulting from the first major wave of the COVID-19 pandemic – no deaths and nearly no illnesses were reported in Patna, while there was widespread l…
Negotiating Informality– Ambiguity, Intermediation, and a Patchwork of Outcomes in Slums of Bengaluru
In developing countries, procedural ambiguity due to bureaucratic overlap and political discretion gives rise to divergence between law and practice. In this context of pervasive informality, it is important to consider how local negotiations produce disparate outcomes. We examine these local negotiations to explain how informal property rights are acquired and how markets operate in the slums of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on original interview an…
The Poorest After the Pandemic
Many developing countries have large populations at risk of falling into chronic poverty due to threats to their health and livelihoods. Despite global poverty reduction over recent decades, many remain near-poor, and an episode of ill health or job loss can plunge a household into poverty. The coronavirus pandemic threatens to send tens of millions of people around the world below the poverty line. Some countries are especially unprepared to pro…
Precarious gains: Social mobility and volatility in urban slums
Local Order, Policing, and Bribes: Evidence from India
Day-to-day policing represents a fundamental interface between citizens and states. Yet even in the most capable states, local policing varies enormously from one community to the next. The authors seek to understand this variation and in doing so make three contributions: First, they conceptualize communities and individuals as networks more or less capable of demanding high-quality policing. Second, they present original survey data and semistr…
Beyond Poverty Escapes—Social Mobility in Developing Countries: A Review Article
While social mobility in advanced economies has received extensive scholarly attention, crucial knowledge gaps remain about the patterns and determinants of income, educational, and occupational mobility in developing countries. Focusing on intergenerational mobility, we find that estimates often differ greatly for the same country, depending on the concept and measure of mobility used, on variable constructions and on the data set utilized. Ther…
Synthetic Fathers and Real Consequences: Social Mobility Research in Transition
Social mobility is a growing concern among academics and practitioners. As countries become more unequal internally, is inequality of opportunity also widening? The rigid stratification of society
Obstacles to Social Mobility in India—And the Way Forward
“For many ... significant upward mobility remains a doubtful prospect, while substantial downward mobility is a real possibility.” Eighth in a series on social mobility around the world
Combining satellite and survey data to study Indian slums: Evidence on the range of conditions and implications for urban policy
Projections suggest that most of the global growth in population in the next few decades will be in urban centres in Asia and Africa. Most of these additional urban residents will be concentrated in slums. However, government documentation of slums is incomplete and unreliable, and many slums remain undocumented. It is necessary to employ creative methods to locate and sample these understudied populations. We used satellite image analysis and fi…
Demonetization in India: One More Rock in the River
An attempt to curb tax evasion by taking large-denomination bills out of circulation overnight imposed new hardships on an Indian populace long accustomed to capricious government initiatives
Should Rich Nations Help the Poor
Should Rich Nations Help the Poor?." Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 18(4), pp. 531–532
Promoting Social Mobility in India: Modes of Action and Types of Support Organizations
Equality of opportunity is an important ideal to uphold in a just society. Beyond its long-standing commitment to affirmative action, relatively little has been done in India to realize this ideal. Compared to other countries, Indian children raised in poverty have a smaller chance of rising to high positions. Seized of this situation, a group of organizations has taken up the mission of social mobility promotion. Through coaching, mentorship, gu…
The Urban-Rural Gap and the Dilemma of Governance
For generations, this urban bias in policy making, inherited from colonial times, has stunted the growth of human capital among the vast rural populations of [developing] countries
The Gradient of Governance: Distance and Disengagement in Indian Villages
National governance scores must be seen in light of large within-country variance. Not only being a rural village, but being located at a substantial distance from cities, has great importance for good governance. Analysis of household data from different parts of rural India shows how villages at greater distances to towns tend to have lower scores on multiple governance dimensions. Even after controlling for diverse influences, using both ordin…
Slum types and adaptation strategies: Identifying policy-relevant differences in Bangalore
An empirical analysis of the lived experiences of more than 2,000 households in different Bangalore slums shows how migration patterns, living conditions, livelihood strategies and prospects for the future vary widely across distinct types of slums that were initially identified from satellite images and studied over a 10-year period. Shocks and responses vary in nature and intensity, and coping and accumulative strategies diverge across slum typ…
Examining the Structure of Opportunity and Social Mobility in India: Who Becomes an Engineer
Rising inequality alongside rapid economic growth reinforces the need to examine patterns of social mobility in India. Are children from less well-off sections also able to rise to higher-paying positions, newly created by the growing economy, or are these positions mainly accessible to established elites? Powered in particular by the software industry, no sector has grown as fast as engineering in India. Examining the social origins of students …
Stuck in Place: Investigating Social Mobility in 14 Bangalore Slums
This study of 14 Bangalore slum communities, including detailed interviews with 1,481 residents, represents an initial effort to study social mobility in India's largest cities, where opportunity and inequality have both been rising. The results show that slum dwellers have advanced economically, but the extent of improvement is small in the majority of cases, and there are many reversals of fortune. Sons tend to follow fathers or uncles into inf…
The Mixed News on Poverty
To make progress toward moving a majority of the world's population into better circumstances, we must adopt a more nuanced view of what constitutes poverty
Globalization, Distance and Disease: Spatial Health Disparities in Rural India
More than 50 per cent of the Indian population lives in villages that are located more than five kilometres from the nearest town. This half of India is more likely to experience illnesses of different kinds and simultaneously less likely to get qualified medical treatment. The incidence of premature deaths, infant and child mortality and malnutrition are all significantly higher within villages located further from towns. In consequence, such vi…
Enhancing Political Participation in Democracies: What is the Role of Social Capital
What factors account for a more active and politically engaged citizenry? Macro-national institutions, micro-level influences (such as individuals' wealth and education), and meso-level factors, particularly social capital, have been stressed variously in different studies. How do these different factors stack up against one another? What contribution does social capital make compared with the other factors? And how—through what channels—is socia…
Pathways out of and into poverty in 36 villages of Andhra Pradesh, India
Moving from the Stock of Social Capital to the Flow of Benefits: The Role of Agency
Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor: Who Gains, Who Loses, and Why
How Does Social Capital Grow? A Seven-Year Study of Villages in India
Social capital has been shown to be important for strengthening democracy and promoting development, but relatively little is known about how social capital grows, especially over the short to medium term. To help identify the nature and sources of growth in social capital, I constructed a panel data set for 61 villages in India, including repeat interviews (in 1997 and 2004) with more than 1,700 respondents. Considerable changes in social capita…
Gaining Access to Public Services and the Democratic State in India: Institutions in the Middle
For Reducing Poverty Faster: Target Reasons Before People
What Is Happening to Caste? A View from Some North Indian Villages
The role of caste in indian politics is undergoing considerable change. Caste and patron-client links have been regarded traditionally as the building blocks of political organization in India (Brass 1994; Manor 1997; Migdal 1988; Kothari 1988; Weiner 1967), and vertical and horizontal mobilizations by patrons and caste leaders, respectively, have been important influences on political outcomes (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). There are indications, h…
Slum types and adaptation strategies: Identifying policy-relevant differences in Bangalore
An empirical analysis of the lived experiences of more than 2,000 households in different Bangalore slums shows how migration patterns, living conditions, livelihood strategies and prospects for the future vary widely across distinct types of slums that were initially identified from satellite images and studied over a 10-year period. Shocks and responses vary in nature and intensity, and coping and accumulative strategies diverge across slum typ…
Combining satellite and survey data to study Indian slums: Evidence on the range of conditions and implications for urban policy
Projections suggest that most of the global growth in population in the next few decades will be in urban centres in Asia and Africa. Most of these additional urban residents will be concentrated in slums. However, government documentation of slums is incomplete and unreliable, and many slums remain undocumented. It is necessary to employ creative methods to locate and sample these understudied populations. We used satellite image analysis and fi…
Who became poor, who escaped poverty, and why? Developing and using a retrospective methodology in five countries
The Stages‐of‐Progress methodology helps identify context‐specific reasons associated with households' movements into or out of poverty. Developed in 2002, it was used over the next seven years for examining the experiences of 35,567 households in 398 diverse communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina. This essay looks at the reasons that motivated the development of a different methodology for exploring poverty flows, explores…
Poverty and Democratic Participation Reconsidered: Evidence from the Local Level in India
Precarious gains: Social mobility and volatility in urban slums
Local Order, Policing, and Bribes: Evidence from India
Day-to-day policing represents a fundamental interface between citizens and states. Yet even in the most capable states, local policing varies enormously from one community to the next. The authors seek to understand this variation and in doing so make three contributions: First, they conceptualize communities and individuals as networks more or less capable of demanding high-quality policing. Second, they present original survey data and semistr…
The Irrelevance of National Strategies? Rural Poverty Dynamics in States and Regions of India, 1993–2005
Examining the Structure of Opportunity and Social Mobility in India: Who Becomes an Engineer
Rising inequality alongside rapid economic growth reinforces the need to examine patterns of social mobility in India. Are children from less well-off sections also able to rise to higher-paying positions, newly created by the growing economy, or are these positions mainly accessible to established elites? Powered in particular by the software industry, no sector has grown as fast as engineering in India. Examining the social origins of students …
The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization
The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization. By Ariel C. Armony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 312p. $55.00. Ariel Armony's work provides a useful corrective to some of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of civil society, associationism, social capital, and “the third sector.” In particular, the crude claim that is sometimes made—namely, that high membership in voluntary associations leads uniquely to a higher qual…
A threat to life and livelihoods: Examining the effects of the first wave of Covid-19 on health and wellbeing in Bengaluru and Patna slums
Taking advantage of our existing dataset of 6,721 slum households in two Indian cities, we undertook six rounds of follow-up phone interviews on the impact of COVID-19 between July and November 2020 with three key informants in each of 40 diverse slums. These cities showed contrasting health effects resulting from the first major wave of the COVID-19 pandemic – no deaths and nearly no illnesses were reported in Patna, while there was widespread l…
Continuity and change: The Indian administrative service 30 years ago and today
Continuity trumps change: in essential respects the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) remains as it was 30 years ago. Thirty years hence the IAS should continue much as it is, albeit with gradually waning influence. Pressures from below and above will increasingly constrict the zone of discretion enjoyed by IAS officials. But in the foreseeable future the basic structure of the IAS will remain substantially unchanged
Hierarchical Integration: The Dollar Economy and the Rupee Economy
While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under-researched dimension of the emerging twenty-first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relation…
A Range of Informality Across Cities and Slums: Understanding Precarity in Patna’s Slums Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article proposes a framework for understanding why slum residents are particularly vulnerable to economic downturns. We centre evidence from Bihar’s capital city, Patna, to examine how downturns are experienced more severely in some cities and slums than others. We argue slums are zones of pervasive informality, remaining largely disconnected from formal institutions and dependent on discretionary supports. But the extent of informality, and…
Promoting Social Mobility in India: Modes of Action and Types of Support Organizations
Equality of opportunity is an important ideal to uphold in a just society. Beyond its long-standing commitment to affirmative action, relatively little has been done in India to realize this ideal. Compared to other countries, Indian children raised in poverty have a smaller chance of rising to high positions. Seized of this situation, a group of organizations has taken up the mission of social mobility promotion. Through coaching, mentorship, gu…
Globalization, Distance and Disease: Spatial Health Disparities in Rural India
More than 50 per cent of the Indian population lives in villages that are located more than five kilometres from the nearest town. This half of India is more likely to experience illnesses of different kinds and simultaneously less likely to get qualified medical treatment. The incidence of premature deaths, infant and child mortality and malnutrition are all significantly higher within villages located further from towns. In consequence, such vi…
Fixing the Hole in the Bucket: Household Poverty Dynamics in the Peruvian Andes
Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escapefrompoverty, and stemming the flow of peopleintopoverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes f…
Moving from the Stock of Social Capital to the Flow of Benefits: The Role of Agency
Active Social Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy
The idea of social capital allows scholars to assess the quality of relationships among people within a particular community and show how that quality affects the ability to achieve shared goals. With evidence collected from sixty-nine villages in India, Krishna investigates what social capital is, how it operates in practice, and what results it can be expected to produce. Does social capital provide a viable means for advancing economic develop…
Active social capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy
Enhancing Political Participation in Democracies: What is the Role of Social Capital
What factors account for a more active and politically engaged citizenry? Macro-national institutions, micro-level influences (such as individuals' wealth and education), and meso-level factors, particularly social capital, have been stressed variously in different studies. How do these different factors stack up against one another? What contribution does social capital make compared with the other factors? And how—through what channels—is socia…
Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor: Who Gains, Who Loses, and Why
What Is Happening to Caste? A View from Some North Indian Villages
The role of caste in indian politics is undergoing considerable change. Caste and patron-client links have been regarded traditionally as the building blocks of political organization in India (Brass 1994; Manor 1997; Migdal 1988; Kothari 1988; Weiner 1967), and vertical and horizontal mobilizations by patrons and caste leaders, respectively, have been important influences on political outcomes (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). There are indications, h…
Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor in 20 Kenyan Villages
Three hundred and sixteen households in 20 western Kenyan villages — 19% of all households in these villages — managed successfully to escape from poverty in the past 25 years. However, another 325 households (i.e. 19% of all households of these villages) fell into abiding poverty in the same period. Different causes are associated with households falling into poverty and those overcoming poverty. Separate policies will be required consequently t…
Why growth is not enough: Household poverty dynamics in Northeast Gujarat, India
Despite high growth rates in Gujarat, exceeding 9 per cent per year over the decade of the 1990s, poverty in 36 villages located in the northeastern part of this state has changed hardly at all. In these villages, 9.5 per cent of households escaped from poverty over the past 25 years, but 6.3 per cent of households became poor at the same time. Escape and descent are not symmetric: different reasons account for escaping poverty than those for dec…
Pathways out of and into poverty in 36 villages of Andhra Pradesh, India
The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization
The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization. By Ariel C. Armony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 312p. $55.00. Ariel Armony's work provides a useful corrective to some of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of civil society, associationism, social capital, and “the third sector.” In particular, the crude claim that is sometimes made—namely, that high membership in voluntary associations leads uniquely to a higher qual…
Escaping poverty and becoming poor in 36 villages of Central and Western Uganda
Twenty-four per cent of households in 36 village communities of Central and Western Uganda have escaped from poverty over the past 25 years, but another 15 per cent have simultaneously fallen into poverty. A roughly equal number of households escaped from poverty in the first period (ten to 25 years ago) as in the second period (the last ten years) examined here. However, almost twice as many households fell into poverty during the second period …
Poverty and Democratic Participation Reconsidered: Evidence from the Local Level in India
Fixing the Hole in the Bucket: Household Poverty Dynamics in the Peruvian Andes
Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escapefrompoverty, and stemming the flow of peopleintopoverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes f…
For Reducing Poverty Faster: Target Reasons Before People
How Does Social Capital Grow? A Seven-Year Study of Villages in India
Social capital has been shown to be important for strengthening democracy and promoting development, but relatively little is known about how social capital grows, especially over the short to medium term. To help identify the nature and sources of growth in social capital, I constructed a panel data set for 61 villages in India, including repeat interviews (in 1997 and 2004) with more than 1,700 respondents. Considerable changes in social capita…
Poverty, Participation, and Democracy: A Global Perspective
For too long a conventional wisdom has held sway, suggesting that poor people in poor countries are not supportive of democracy and that democracies will be sustained only after a certain average level of wealth has been achieved. Evidence from 24 diverse countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America examined in this volume shows how poor people do not value democracy any less than their richer counterparts. Their faith in democracy is as high as t…
Hierarchical Integration: The Dollar Economy and the Rupee Economy
While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under-researched dimension of the emerging twenty-first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relation…
Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition
Why Don't ‘the Poor’ Make Common Cause? The Importance of Subgroups
Analyses that regard ‘the poor’ as a sociological category need to take account of recent studies quantifying the extent of flux within these ranks. Frequent movements into and out of poverty regularly refresh the pool of the poor. Large numbers of poor people were not born poor: they have descended into poverty, some quite recently. Concurrently, many formerly poor people have escaped from poverty. Distinct subgroups are defined by these diverge…
One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty
Continuity and change: The Indian administrative service 30 years ago and today
Continuity trumps change: in essential respects the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) remains as it was 30 years ago. Thirty years hence the IAS should continue much as it is, albeit with gradually waning influence. Pressures from below and above will increasingly constrict the zone of discretion enjoyed by IAS officials. But in the foreseeable future the basic structure of the IAS will remain substantially unchanged
The Irrelevance of National Strategies? Rural Poverty Dynamics in States and Regions of India, 1993–2005
Who became poor, who escaped poverty, and why? Developing and using a retrospective methodology in five countries
The Stages‐of‐Progress methodology helps identify context‐specific reasons associated with households' movements into or out of poverty. Developed in 2002, it was used over the next seven years for examining the experiences of 35,567 households in 398 diverse communities of India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina. This essay looks at the reasons that motivated the development of a different methodology for exploring poverty flows, explores…
Gaining Access to Public Services and the Democratic State in India: Institutions in the Middle
How Much Can Asset Transfers Help the Poorest? Evaluating the Results of BRAC's Ultra-Poor Programme (2002–2008)
This article was published in The Journal of Development Studies [©2012 Rights managed by Taylor & Francis] and the definite version is available at: ttps://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2011.621942 The Article's website is at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220388.2011.621942?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Economics (42 works) · Economic growth (35 works) · Political science (33 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Development economics (26 works) · Geography (25 works) · Poverty (23 works) · Income, Poverty, and Inequality (22 works) · Socioeconomics (19 works) · Law (17 works)