An effort of mapping the income inequality in the district of Purulia, West Bengal, India

The incidence of income inequality belongs to the core of poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition, starvation and a few hundreds of other socioeconomic problems or may be said the socioeconomic hazards. Present-day researches within the domain of socioeconomic sciences are focused to develop the ‘tools and techniques’ of demarcating the areas having a degree of vulnerability to a particular socioeconomic hazard and to examine the internal functions of the interactive variables associated with the process. The distribution of income inequality, spatially or temporally, can be expressed not by the per-capita income only but through combining the distribution of workforce, accompanied with the assorted income level within the working population; and, based on this algorithm, the present paper proposes an indicator of income inequality. The response of the indicator is validated by analyzing its synchronization with the renowned Kuznets inequality distribution model. Then, the mapping of income inequality is done for the district of Purulia, utilizing the validated indicator on GIS platform. © 2017, Institute for Social and Economic Change.