While the political science literature has produced extensive knowledge on the causes of communal violence in India, no attention has been paid to the consequences of persistence violence on the lives of populations in areas of communal violence. This paper analyses the welfare consequences of communal violence in Maharashtra.
This analysis is based on a unique survey of 1000 households conducted by the authors on individual experience of rioting and other forms of violence.The survey includes information on household composition,welfare and exposure to violence. The paper makes use of this survey to link household and individual exposure to violence with vulnerability to poverty, to profile the actors of violence from an economic perspective, to uncover the coping strategies of households exposed to violence and to estimate the consequences of violence on household poverty andvulnerability.