South Asia and the Future of Pro-People Development: The Centrality of Social Justice and Equality

The SAAPE 2016 Poverty Report is both a descriptive account of the resistance movements of South Asia and a critical examination of the structures and processes that created them. This is a narrative of people’s experience of what the multiple development trajectories and histories have been through the policies of states and their successive governments. We record here, the voices that seek to redress the keen sense of material deprivation and the loss of freedoms of life and livelihood, of expression and association, of identity and belonging as well as entitlements of resources and opportunities. All this and much more lie at the heart of democratic polity and point toward non-realisation of full and equal citizenship in South Asia today.