Poverty has been in the forefront of research in economics for the last half a century. More than one billion people, a sixth of the world’s population, still live in conditions of extreme poverty and hunger. Policies for the upliftment of this geographically disparate and culturally diverse mass of humanity would require a concerted effort looking at the lessons learnt from previous work done in this field, and more importantly, to develop new frameworks for analysing poverty.

The discussion on operationalising the right to development has received significant attention in recent years with the recommendations of the Independent Expert on the Right to Development in his reports to the General Assembly of the United Nations. His interpretation of the Right to Development as the right to a “particular” process of development is based on the fact that it is “basically centered around the concepts of equity and justice, with the majority of the population who are currently poor and deprived to be brought upwards in their living standards and capacity to improve their position”.

There is thus an umbilical link between poverty alleviation and the implementation of the right to development framework. This has been emphasised in the Second Report of the Independent Expert where he contends that “(f)rom the perspective of a rights-based approach to human development, the concept of poverty goes much beyond just income poverty……it is a gross violation of human rights. The eradication of poverty should be the first priority of a policy for realizing the right to development”.

Research on poverty at CDHR stresses the underlying principle of RTD in designing the implementation of poverty alleviation schemes. This involves a substantial rethink of the existing methodologies for analysis of poverty, right for the planning to the design and implementation. In this respect, it is CDHR’s endeavour to learn from the experiences of other countries and regions, and work with policy-makers and civil society organisations for a dialogue on poverty alleviation from the RTD perspective.