Compare capability deprivation approach with that of social capital deprivation in understanding chronic poverty. (Answer in 350 words)

- Compare capability deprivation approach with that of social capital deprivation in understanding chronic poverty. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
One approach asks what the poor are able to do, the other whom they are able to reach; chronic poverty is where the two meet.

Body

1. What each takes deprivation to consist of: For Sen, in Development as Freedom, poverty is the deprivation of capabilities — the real freedoms to achieve functionings such as being nourished, literate, healthy and able to appear in public without shame. Income is only a means, and its conversion into capability varies with age, disability, gender and social setting. The social capital approach, drawing on Bourdieu's durable networks, Coleman on obligations and trust and Putnam's bonding and bridging ties, takes deprivation to be the absence of usable relationships — the contacts, memberships and reciprocities through which work, credit, information and protection actually move.

2. The axes on which they differ: The unit: capability rests with the person and her conversion factors, social capital in the relation and is held collectively. The mechanism of persistence: capability failure reproduces itself through undernutrition, interrupted schooling and ill health passed between generations; social capital failure through exclusion from the networks that allocate opportunity, which in India runs along caste, where Thorat's work on discrimination in labour and credit markets shows bonding ties without bridging ones. Measurement: capability yields the Multidimensional Poverty Index built by Alkire and Foster, with observable deprivations in health, education and living standards, while social capital has no settled metric. Remedy: public provisioning and entitlements against organisation and access. Normative status: capability is unambiguously a good, social capital is not, since networks that protect insiders exclude everybody else.

3. Where they agree or combine: Both refuse income as a sufficient measure, and both become relational once conversion factors are taken seriously — Sen's own writing on social exclusion treats the absence of ties as itself a capability deprivation. In practice they are used together: self-help groups build the ties that convert into credit and confidence, while school meals, health services and schooling build the capabilities without which ties yield little.

4. Which explains chronic poverty better: Capability deprivation, because it names the mechanism by which poverty passes between generations. Social capital explains the other half — why identical capabilities earn different returns for different castes and communities.

Conclusion
Chronic poverty is best read as capability failure locked in place by the ties the poor are not permitted to form.