POVERTY

 POVERTY

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• When a person is unable to fulfil his basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, he is said to be living in poverty.

• The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have driven the most successful anti-poverty movement in history and brought more than a billion people out of extreme poverty, but their achievements have been mixed and the world remains deeply driven by inequality, the United Nations (UN’s) final report on the goals has concluded.

• The world has reduced the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015.

• The World Bank raised the international poverty line to $ 1.90 per day from the existing $1.25 in October,2015.

TYPES OF POVERTY

The poverty has two aspects, which are as follows

i.  Absolute Poverty  Low level of income, which is not sufficient to fulfil required basic minimum needs.

ii. Relative Poverty  It refers to poverty on the basis of comparison of per capita income of different countries.

Measurement of Poverty

A common method used to measure poverty is based on the income or consumption level.  Generally, an average calorie intake of 2400 calories for rural people and 2100 calorie for urban people is taken as a determining value.

State of Poverty

(World Bank Report)

World Bank on 18th April, 2013, in its report entitled ‘Where are the Poor and Most Poor’, observed that

• One-third of the global poor are in India and the poor in India live on less than US$1.25 a day.  There are around 120 crore extremely poor persons in the world today.  Between 1981-2010, the developing countries have witnessed a decline in poverty rate from 50% to 21%.

• Despite development in Africa, poverty is still widespread.

Poverty Estimation by Committees in India

Various economists and organisations have studied the extent of poverty in India.  Some of them are as follows

i. Lakdawala Committee  In September, 1989, the Planning Commission constituted an Expert Group to consider methodological and computational aspects of estimation of proportion and number of poor in India.  The Chairman of the Expert Group was Professor DT Lakdawala.

ii.Tendulkar Committee Report The Tendulkar Committee submitted its report in  December, 2009, to the Planning Commission.  In its findings, this committee has moved away from just calorie criterion definition to a broader definition of poverty that also includes expenditure on health, education, clothing in addition to food.  The updated poverty estimates of the Tendulkar Committee have lowered the poverty line from ₹32 a day to ₹28.

iii.SR Hashim Committee  The Planning Commission had constituted an expert group under the Chairmanship of SR Hashim on 13th May, 2010, to recommend detailed methodology for identification of BPL families in urban areas in the context of the Twelfth Five Year Plan.  The panel has suggested that the government should use a three-stage approach-automatic exclusion, automatic inclusion and scoring index to identify urban poor.

iv.Rangarajan Report on Poverty  The Expert Group under the Chairmanship of Dr C Rangarajan has submitted its report on 30th June, 2014.  The report retained consumption expenditure estimates on NSSO as the basis for determining poverty.  On the basis of this, it pegged the total number of poor in India at 363 million or 29.6% of the population which is higher than the report of Suresh Tendulkar Committee.

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