Published Paper Details:

The tribal community has a very long history in all over the world. The Pardhi community in India is also one of the tribal community having its unique cultural aspects, social belief system and lifestyle. After the repealed of Criminal Tribes Act 1971 (CTA) into the series of Habitual Offenders Acts1 1952 and 1959, Pardhi community was tagged as the denotified tribal community. This is one of the socio-economically deprived segments of the society in Maharashtra in general and Solapur district in particular. The high incidence of poverty is one of the features of this community. No, doubt that government has taken keen efforts to uplift the conditions of the tribal community through several welfare schemes and policies after independence, but still the condition of this community is dismal. This community has very low access to livelihood sources. They are often migrating from one place to another in the search of work and settlement. Under this backdrop, the new approach towards the measuring poverty i.e. multidimensional poverty index has constructed based on 340 sample respondents interviewed from the eleven tehsils of Solapur district. Three main techniques are used to assess the extent of poverty in the Pardhi community of Solapur district. These techniques are adjusted head count ratio, adjusted poverty gap and adjusted squared poverty gap. These three measures jointly provide the value of multidimensional poverty index. Three major indices were taken into account i.e health, education and standard of living. The Alkire and Foster (AF) method has used to measure the multidimensional poverty index. The data collected from the questionnaire schedule was processed in excel and R software. It has found that the comparatively incidence of poverty among the Pardhi community is more in case of urban area than that of rural area. The economic condition of the community is very dismal and they have rare access to livelihood sources. It has suggested to the government to provide special attention and priority, to Pardhi community in the welfare schemes, for improvement in standard of living and breaking vicious circle of poverty.