Endnotes
1 The poverty line is set for each state, and represents the level of consumer expenditure per capita required to ensure a calorie intake of 2100 per day in urban areas and 2400 per day in rural areas. In 1995–96, it was estimated that 20.5% of Gujarat’s rural population, and 30.7% of the urban population, were BPL.
2 For the purpose of this study, we considered recent migrants as those who had moved from their place of origin/birth (or usual residence) within the previous year (Census 2001). For the purpose of the in-depth interviews, non-migrants were those who had lived at their current place of residence since birth.
3 The latest poverty statistics for India suggest that in 1999–2000, 28.6% of the total population were living below the ‘national poverty line’ (World Bank 2010). We chose to compare coping strategies among the poorest 30% of respondents (vs the less poor 70%) as they might roughly be thought of as representing those who live below the poverty line (vs those who live above the poverty line). This is a rather arbitrary and imperfect cut-off, given that Gujarat does tend to perform slightly better than all-India on measures of poverty (and so is likely to have a poverty line lower than 30%) and, more importantly, given that respondents to the exit survey are not representative of the general population.