I feel like that's conflating yet a third kind of poverty: having no societal respectability. Having no social "credit." No https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Whuffie .
Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty."
Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US.
That experience is really nothing like absolute or relative poverty. It's its own kind of horrible. (It's an orthogonal poverty, one could say.)
It does lead to a vicious cycle that connects it to absolute/relative poverty, though, since having no societal respectability means people aren't willing to offer you any opportunities to better your situation, because they think badly of you and expect you to squander them.
But I would say it is nevertheless best to think of a low-caste homeless person in Delhi as having three distinct problems: relative poverty, absolute poverty, and poverty of societal-respectability.
I would note that, while a regular homeless person in Toronto might not know anything about the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India, a drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction would actually understand it somewhat. In both cases, for example, if someone in these groups gets murdered or otherwise wronged, the police don't even bother to investigate — so they have no access to justice. The low-caste homeless in Delhi and the crack-addicted streetwalker in Toronto would see the same looks on people's faces, and understand them to mean the same thing.
I agree that the caste issues are orthogonal to the others and that these three kinds of poverty come close to encompassing the problem being discussed.
And if this were to be the complete picture, why can't it express the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India?
Take the case of a "drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction" in Toronto - this person arrived here by their own choices (some amount of agency), but you can be born into that situation (with the awareness that your children will follow the same path) in India. [0]
You can't worry about societal respectability when you have no basic human dignity. Perhaps that is a fourth kind of poverty.
Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty."
Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US.
That experience is really nothing like absolute or relative poverty. It's its own kind of horrible. (It's an orthogonal poverty, one could say.)
It does lead to a vicious cycle that connects it to absolute/relative poverty, though, since having no societal respectability means people aren't willing to offer you any opportunities to better your situation, because they think badly of you and expect you to squander them.
But I would say it is nevertheless best to think of a low-caste homeless person in Delhi as having three distinct problems: relative poverty, absolute poverty, and poverty of societal-respectability.
I would note that, while a regular homeless person in Toronto might not know anything about the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India, a drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction would actually understand it somewhat. In both cases, for example, if someone in these groups gets murdered or otherwise wronged, the police don't even bother to investigate — so they have no access to justice. The low-caste homeless in Delhi and the crack-addicted streetwalker in Toronto would see the same looks on people's faces, and understand them to mean the same thing.