South Asia Policy Research on Intersectional Inequalities

Aims & Objectives: The UNDP has globally adopted a new strategic plan to help countries eradicate poverty and simultaneously reduce inequality and exclusion. A document titled ‘Humanity Divided: Confronting inequality in developing countries’ was released in January 2014 which revisited the theories on inequality, its measurement and recent trends to evaluate and design contemporary policies that could suitably combat major challenges across 15 countries.

In the Indian subcontinent, the project aimed at identifying and presenting up to 15 original perspectives on intersectional inequalities to be proposed by leading members of various think tanks in the form of high‐quality papers. These papers will expand on the issues deliberated upon in the round table on ‘Intersectional Inequality: Perspectives from South Asia’. The following actions were undertaken for this assignment titled ‘Policy and Advocacy’ by UNDP India to attain the objectives mentioned above:

Two multidisciplinary conferences were conducted to specifically categorise the main cross‐cutting issues to understand persistent inequality in the sub‐continent.

• A common vision was prepared to develop and guide further research on analysing and addressing the challenges in eradicating intersectional inequality based on the discussion and deliberations in the conference;
• Consequently, it was decided that 15 papers would be commissioned on the relevant issues, a comprehensive research agenda would be drawn up and the possibilities of policy advocacy would be examined.