Art for life: Intangible cultural heritage and livelihood development in India

It is now widely accepted that culture plays an important role in development. There are, however, disparate views regarding the nature of its signifi cance. Some proponents have highlighted the benefi t of cultural heritage as source of income and employment generation, while others have mostly regarded culture as a set of knowledge, social practices and value systems distinctive to each community that need to be respected in order to make any developmental intervention a success. However, it is also true that many governments, especially in the global South, have yet to fully harness the potentials of the cultural sector into national development policy. One of the possible reasons may be that, over the past two decades, ‘culture for development’ has turned out to be more like a romantic rhetoric or an assumption than a concrete methodology with tangible results.