Not what a household earns,
but what it holds
The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, made clickable. Eight Indian livelihoods drawn as asset pentagons across five capitals — human, social, natural, physical and financial — shown together so the shapes can be compared, because the shape is the argument.
Open any one for its vulnerability context, the structures that decide what its assets are actually worth, and the evidence behind each corner.
The framework is DFID’s, from the Sustainable Livelihoods Guidance Sheets (1999), formalising an argument by Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway (IDS, 1992) and given its analytical shape by Ian Scoones (IDS, 1998). ImpactMojo added the Indian evidence. Full credits ↓
The average Indian agricultural household earns ₹4,063 a month from wages and ₹3,058 from crop production.
Both figures are from the same survey. The households that agriculture defines earn more from selling their labour than from farming their land — which is invisible if you look at income alone, and obvious the moment you look at what they hold.
Where the framework is contested
The most serious objection is that it flattens power. Five neutral-sounding capitals can be drawn for a landlord and for the labourer on that land without anything in the diagram showing that one is the reason for the other. The framework describes distribution and is close to silent on how the distribution arose — which is why it should be read beside the Wheel of Power.
A second objection is that treating credit as an asset is a category error for a household borrowing at distress rates. The evidence on this page bears that out: for households with almost no land, half of all outstanding borrowing is owed to professional moneylenders. Whether that corner of the pentagon is an asset or a liability depends entirely on its terms, and the shape does not show terms.
And the pentagon is a stock, not a direction. Two households with identical shapes can be one accumulating and one selling down, and the framework as drawn cannot tell them apart.
Eight livelihoods, drawn to the same scale
Compare them before reading any of them. The totals are less informative than the missing corners — and one corner, natural capital, turns out to decide how large several of the others can be.
One pentagon at a time
Each livelihood, with the shocks and trends it sits inside, the structures that price its assets, and the evidence for each score.
Whose framework this is
The framework as drawn
DFID, Sustainable Livelihoods Guidance Sheets (1999). The asset pentagon, the vulnerability context, and the transforming structures and processes are set out there in the form used on this page.
UK Department for International Development
The argument underneath it
Robert Chambers and Gordon R. Conway, “Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century”, IDS Discussion Paper 296 (1992). The definition of a livelihood as capabilities, assets and activities, and the case for starting from what people have, are theirs.
Institute of Development Studies, Sussex
The analytical shape
Ian Scoones, “Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis”, IDS Working Paper 72 (1998), which set out the capitals, the institutional processes and the livelihood strategies as an analytical sequence rather than a checklist.
Institute of Development Studies, Sussex
What ImpactMojo added
The eight Indian livelihoods, the scoring of each on the five capitals, the small-multiple comparison, and the evidence: the survey, statute or judgment behind each position, with a named source and year, plus a note on what each shape does not settle.
ImpactMojo, 2026 · content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · code MIT
Sources drawn on
MoSPI, NSS 77th Round — Land and Livestock Holdings and the Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households (2018–19) · MoSPI Time Use Survey (2024) · MoSPI Periodic Labour Force Survey (2023–24) · Forest Rights Act (2006) · Orissa Mining Corporation v Ministry of Environment & Forests (2013) · MGNREGA (2005) · Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act (1979) · state Marine Fishing Regulation Acts · Department of Food & Public Distribution, ONORC.
Using this in a workshop
Draw the pentagon for a household the group works with, from memory, before looking at any data. Then ask which corner the programme is actually adding to, and which corner is the one that limits the household. They are very often not the same corner, and that mismatch is usually the most useful hour of the day.
Then ask the harder question the framework invites: which of the five capitals could this household lose without anybody recording that anything had been lost? For the pastoralist and the fisher on this page the answer is the one their livelihood rests on.
If you reproduce the framework, credit DFID, Chambers and Conway, and Scoones. If you reproduce this evidence or the scoring, credit ImpactMojo — and the scores are ours, so argue with them in the open.