Poornima Rajeshwar

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023–2024 Academic Year

Lives and Livelihoods: An ethnographic study of dimensions of well-being

India is home to the largest livelihood protection programs in the world, which seek to ensure access to waged-employment, agriculture subsidy, food, health services, credit and education. Over the last few years, these programs have seen severe budgetary cuts, with funding slashed by over a third for its flagship scheme of waged-employment. In response, there have been large-scale protests across the country defending their right to livelihood. The question of livelihood, a concept that seeks to capture the relation between means of well-being and human flourishing, is brought into sharp focus by such ruptures in welfare policy. This project seeks to study what constitutes livelihood for the poor and how it is articulated in their daily life.

Poornima Rajeshwar, Department of Anthropology

Poornima Rajeshwar is a PhD student in Anthropology at Stanford. Her research areas of interest include labor, livelihood, gender, development, economic and political anthropology and South Asia. She holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.

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