India is a beautiful nation enriched with diversity among its natural resources as well as social ingenuousness. People of different social status are well connected with each other’s conditions which is the key to our intellectual development and that makes our civilisation survive till date. Poverty is the main challenge for the economy of any nation, but in a developing nation poverty is a threat to its progress. As a result, poverty leads to security issue in India, most of the crimes being related to inability of having choices and opportunities, which is a violation of human dignity and lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. In India, poverty is triggering instability and uncertainty among different strata of the society. As Kofi Annan, seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations says, “Extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere”. Therefore, in developing countries like us poverty is taking chronic status. Poverty is not only the lack of sufficient food or money, but also the lack of necessary amenities required for dignified social development. Hence, poverty is a threat to the functioning of India’s democracy.
Oxfam survey in early 2018 revealed that the richest 1% in India cornered 73% of the wealth generated in the country in 2017. The survey also showed that India’s richest 1% held a huge 58% of the country’s total wealth—higher than the global figure of about 50%. Around 67 crore Indians comprising the poorest half of the population saw their wealth rise by just 1%, whereas the wealth of India’s richest 1% increased by over Rs. 20.9 lakh crore during 2017—an amount equivalent to the total budget of the Central Government in 2017-18, Oxfam India said. The survey and data say that Indian economy is getting richer and richer but the income gap in the Indian society is getting deeper year by year. This economic inequality will particularly integrate cyclic poverty that could fracture the lines of caste, religion, region and gender. Across the world, women consistently earn less than men and are concentrated in the lowest paid jobs. By comparison, 9 out of 10 billionaires are men. In India, there are only four women billionaires and three of them have inherited family wealth. Poverty is a lack of scope for wealth exploration too which blocks the expansion and social development. “As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality exist in our world, none of us can truly rest,” said Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa.
Poverty is a multifaceted concept inclusive of social, economic and political elements. It is complex to define poverty. It depends on multidimensional elements like region, area, geographical condition, circumstances and many more. On the basis of social, economic and political aspects poverty can be identified as absolute, relative, situational, generational, rural, urban. Absolute poverty was first introduced in 1990. The “dollar a day” poverty line measured absolute poverty by the standards of the world’s poorest countries. It is usually common both in underdeveloped and developing countries.It is limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy.According to Jeffrey David Sachs, an American economist and former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the extreme global poverty could be eliminated by 2025 if the wealthy countries of the world were to increase their combined foreign aid budgets. So the United Nations, World Bank and different other socio-economic associations are taking different initiatives apart from donations to eradicate the absolute poverty situations from poverty-driven countries specially Africa and Southeast Asia, etc. Relative poverty is measured as the percentage of the population with income less than some fixed proportion of median income. It is social perspective comparison of economic status. Situational and generational poverties are temporary but complicated as people are trapped in it and unable to access the tools required to get out of it. On happening of adverse events like environmental disaster, job loss and severe health problem, these poverty situations are handed over to individual and families from one generation to another. More than any donations, specific scopes, opportunity and empowerment are strongly effective to eradicate this situation.
As in India, 60% of the poor still reside in the States of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The reason for these States to be in the category of the poorest state is because most of the tribal people live there. Also, most of these regions are either flood-prone or suffer from calamities. These conditions hamper agriculture to a great extent, on which the household income of these people depends. A disaster management and climate-friendly development can really eradicate such type of poverty issues.Rural Poverty occurs in rural areas where population is below 50,000. These types of areas have less job opportunities, less access to quality services, less support for disabilities and education opportunities. People are tending to live mostly on farming and other menial work available in the surroundings. For eliminating this type of poverty there must be well-connected network in rural and urban areas. There should be communication facilities along with good transport networks, so that the people of rural areas could move freely and farmers with their articles can come to urban market directly without any intermediate aggregations. North east or the geographically isolated villages of India are facing these poverty issues. Though several government schemes have been introduced for travel and communications, there is a long way to go for complete elimination. The metropolitan areas with population over 50,000 are facing urban poverty where the urban poor are facing challenges regarding limited access to health and education, improper social protection mechanism, inadequacy in housing services, violent and unhealthy environment because of overcrowding. Senior citizens are also facing this unemployment issue because of high commodity values and costly medical treatment. Rural housing schemes, health insurance schemes and proper food subsidies are very much effective. The rural poverty rate is growing and has exceeded the urban poverty rate every year since data collection began in the 1960s.
Though the extreme or absolute poverty in India that is number of Indians living on less than a dollar is falling fast, the other types of poverty are growing more. Skilled workers with less scope for exploration are introducing cyclic poverty. This poverty trap can be overcome with outside interventions such as different self-employment schemes, heritage developments, livelihood missions etc. Giving fixed sums of money or subsidies may not be able to meet the developmental issues in poverty trap. To bridge the poverty gap, effective empowerment schemes are highly recommended. Climate awareness and preservation of natural habitat can also bring balance between different social strata as Scheduled Tribal communities mostly rely on nature for their livelihood. In the name of urbanisation their natural inheritance must not be altered. The rich diversified flora and fauna of our nation are very efficient for poverty eradication too as they are home to precious animals, medicines and national integrity. Their promotion could increase advanced tourism which would be beneficial for local public as well as bringing in foreign currency.
True causes of poverty in India are lack of economic freedom, misunderstanding the nature of poverty, political bipolarities where people are biased and confused as well as weak and rigid social structure where castes and religions are involved. Children and women are the worst sufferers of poverty because they lack economic freedom in patriarchal society. People’s mindset needs to be changed first as “Poverty is the worst form of violence,” Mahatma Gandhi thought. The only way to reverse this trend is to increase tax collection through progressive direct taxation such as introducing wealth and inheritance taxes and spending this money on education, health, and nutrition for the poor, focusing specially on the early childhood development of the poor. Only then can one hope to create a country of more equal opportunity and spread the benefits of high growth and the country will experience the more inclusive and holistic development. Lastly, it is important to understand that the world is a very small beautiful place, it has no luxury to go through
the same route again as taken by the developed countries for their upgradation. It is high time that the developing countries like India understood the nature and origin of poverty and found indigenous solution, so that climate, people and economy would be equally benefitted. India had never been absolutely poor but past few decades of wealth mismanagement made its people to live in extreme poverty.