Millions of people in rural South Asia continue to be confronted, in their everyday lives, with poverty and inequality – in spite of the fact that ‘poverty alleviation’ has been, and continues to be, a central aspiration of state departments, international development donors and (elite) civil society. Indeed, many argue that these actors – usually considered as driving forces for ‘development’ and social change (positioned in specific relations to the private sector) – failed to reach out to the poor segments of society.

Taking this scenario as a starting point, the paper is an attempt to review contemporary debates on grassroots mobilisation and specifically its links to the challenge of (material) poverty. Grassroots mobilisation is understood here as actions taken by the poor and marginalised themselves in view of making their voices heard, and in view of struggling for dignity and for their livelihoods to improve. Based on this review, the paper identifies core issues that challenge grassroots mobilisation as a concept and as a practice in relation to issues of poverty.     

At the risk of simplification, the review bundles contemporary debates along three axes, i.e. the progressive discourse, the mainstream discourse, and the culturalist discourse. Each of these discourses can be illustrated with an array of contemporary examples: movements of agricultural labour or peasants, radical action by Naxalites or Nepal’s Maoists (for the progressive discourse), the spread of ‘Community-based Organisations’ and NGOs (for the mainstream discourse), to a range of ethnic/regional movements and religiously-inspired agitations (that too use references to social injustice and poverty as core components in their discourses).

Have the masses of poor and marginalised people in South Asia been able to benefit from these grassroots mobilisations (with their diverse forms of justifications)? This, of course, is a difficult question to answer. But the fact that poverty persists and even increases in many places invites a re-visiting of the claims made by many such movements. Accepting a position that grassroots mobilisation indeed is an urgent need to give voice to the poor, the paper identifies two core challenges faced by grassroots mobilisation across discourses: The question of representation, and the emerging realities of rural livelihoods.

The paper concludes by arguing that if grassroots organisations are to give voice to the rural poor, there is a need to analytically learn more on their dealing and their experience with issues like representation (of rural labour and the contemporary changes in the rural contexts), legitimacy (to speak on behalf of the poor) and the actions taken or proposed (beyond agriculture) to enable rural poor in gaining decent livelihoods.