“Compare the capability deprivation approach with that of social capital deprivation in understanding chronic poverty.” (2025)
Chronic poverty is deprivation that lasts for a long time, often across generations. David Hulme and Andrew Shepherd (“Conceptualizing Chronic Poverty”, 2003) put the threshold at about five years or more. The puzzle is why some people stay poor. The capability approach finds the answer in what people are unable to be and do. The social capital approach finds it in the relationships they lack or are trapped in.
Capability deprivation
- Amartya Sen (Commodities and Capabilities, 1985; Development as Freedom, 1999) defines poverty as the failure of basic capabilities, the real freedom to be nourished, literate, healthy and able to appear in public without shame. Income is only a means.
- Conversion factors matter: a disabled person or a woman under patriarchy turns the same income into fewer functionings.
- Chronicity comes from self-reinforcing capability traps. Malnutrition lowers learning, illiteracy lowers earnings, and entitlement failure (Poverty and Famines, 1981) leaves people with nothing to fall back on.
- India’s Multidimensional Poverty Index applies the idea: NITI Aayog estimates that the poor share fell from 29.17% (2013–14) to 11.28% (2022–23).
Social capital deprivation
- Pierre Bourdieu (“The Forms of Capital”, 1986) saw social capital as resources available through durable networks. James Coleman (1988) stressed trust and closure, and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000) separated bonding from bridging ties.
- Deepa Narayan (Bonds and Bridges, 1999) argued that the poor often have strong bonding ties that help them survive but lack the bridging and linking ties to markets and the state that would lift them out.
- Chronicity comes from closed networks. Jobs, credit and information move through caste and kin circles. Dalit applicants face lower callback odds even with equal qualifications (Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell, 2007).
- Policy builds collective ties. DAY-NRLM has organised over 10 crore women into more than 90 lakh self-help groups.
Criteria-wise comparison
| Criterion | Capability deprivation | Social capital deprivation |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of analysis | Individual freedoms (ethical individualism) | Relations, networks, groups |
| What is missing | Substantive freedom to function | Resources embedded in ties |
| Why poverty persists | Low endowments, conversion and entitlement failures | Weak bridging and linking ties, closed networks |
| Measurement | MPI, HDI | Membership, trust, network surveys |
| Policy | Public health, education, rights | Collective mobilisation, associations |
| Blind spot | Groups and power | Structural inequality |
What the comparison reveals
- Each corrects the other. Sen’s approach can look individualist, but in Social Exclusion: Concept, Application and Scrutiny (2000) he treats exclusion from relationships as itself a capability deprivation. Social capital research, in turn, needs the capability lens to show what networks are for.
- Social capital is not always good. Alejandro Portes (1998) pointed to its “negative” side: the exclusion of outsiders and norms that pull members down. John Harriss (Depoliticizing Development, 2001) warned that it shifts blame onto communities and away from the state and class.
- Being connected can also be the problem. Sam Hickey and Andries du Toit (2007) show that the chronically poor are often adversely incorporated: tied in on exploitative terms, as bonded labourers or in labour-contractor chains.
- Evidence supports both. Anirudh Krishna (One Illness Away, 2010) found that households usually fall into poverty through health shocks and debt, a capability failure. Escapes often depend on information and connections, which is social capital.
Conclusion
The two approaches are complementary. Capability deprivation shows what the chronically poor lack; social capital deprivation shows through whom they could gain it and who blocks the way. In India, where chronic poverty is concentrated among Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, public provision for capabilities has to be joined with breaking caste-closed networks.