and Endless Filth: The Saga of the Bhangis

Most developing countries have been involved in planning in one form or the other since their independence from colonial rule. In many of these countries, poverty eradication has been (and continues to be) one of the main objectives. How do we understand this exercise, especially its impact on poverty? Should we examine many case studies from different contexts and get a broad overview or focus on a particular context in great detail? The above books adopt these two distinct approaches. The first (Potts et al., 2003) consists of essays on development plan-ning by academics and development practitioners. It presents case studies from different parts of the developing world and discusses broad conceptual and tech-nical issues. The second (Thekaekara, 1999), written by a scholar-activist, focuses on a subaltern group in India to illustrate a particularly tragic instance of the failure of development planning. Both agree that income poverty is just one of the dimensions of deprivation and “we must look at impoverished lives, and not just at depleted wallets ” (Sen, 2000). Indeed, these two books complement each other in that Potts et al. (2003) focuses largely on income poverty, while Thekaeker