Poverty Nasiria Foundation

Poverty is the root cause in making the developing countries like India backward from other developed countries. Basically, Poverty is an economic state in which people are unable to fulfill their basic requirements for survival i.e. food, clothing & house and experiencing the scarcity of the basic amenities that are needed for their survival. Poverty is a devastating condition prevailing in India, Poverty proved to be a helping hand in raising the problems like crime, low paced development, etc. Since Independence, poverty is a prevalent concern which was not eradicated by India rather it has added more poor people. Moreover, there are millions of poor people in India who come under the category of below poverty line. In India more than 800 million people are considered as poor in which mostly live in countryside. Due to the lack of job and facilities, Indians are migrating into the developing metro cities like Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore or Delhi and get stuck in the large slum areas, having millions of the iron works, without proper hygienic facilities like sufficient water supply, electricity, and waste disposal. These unhygienic conditions give rise to the many diseases like dysentery, cholera and typhus, which majorly affects the children and they may also get die.

Causes of Poverty in India:Overpopulation is one of the root cause of poverty and this further leads to poor health facilities, illiteracy, less access to financial resources. Per capita income is also affected by the multifold increase in population which in turn lowers the per capita income. India will become the largest nation worldwide if it would meet the expected population level by 2026 that is 1.5 billion. But India’s wealth is not growing at the same pace. This give rise to the unemployment and limited availability of jobs which further led to the increase in no of unemployed and poor people. To overcome this problem nearly about 20 million new jobs would be required else no of these poor people keep on increasing. Apart from all above mentioned reasons in the world of money minded people owners are not even bother the hard-work of poor workers, their difficult lives and their earnings as well. The area of interest of owners is just to gain profit and make money. This would make the rich person more richer and poor person more poorer as unskilled poor workers don’t have any choice but to work for low wages because the number of job finders are much more than the jobs available. The government should strictly make the norms and set the standards of minimum wages for these workers and also take the responsibility for their implementation.

In 1947 the average income in India was similar to South Korea. While South Korea became a developed country by the 2000 India has continued fighting against the poverty without any success.

For the first 40 years, India followed the economic planning, nationalization programs and government ownership of industry as done in Soviet erstwhile USSR. India’s economic growth averaged at 3.5%, while other Asian economies such as South Korea grew on average more than twice that rate annually. The per capita income in India grew at 1.49% annually, while incomes of South Koreans – rich and poor – rose rapidly.

There are some figures and facts on poverty in India are as follows:

At present 28.5% of the Indian population lives below the poverty line. Poor category having the people whose daily earning is less than or below 27 rupees per day in rural areas and 33 rupees a day in urban areas.Before thirty years, India was comprised of the one-fifth of world’s poor people but now it provides shelter to one-third of poor population. Dalits, Tribal people and Labour class comprising farmers in rural areas and workers in urban areas are occupying the poorest class in India. In majority of poor people around 60% are live in the states of Chattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Uttarakhand. These states are considered to be poorest because 85% of the tribal population live there and most of them are flood prone. These situations affect the crops and fields to a large extent, on which income of above people relies. Despite of availability of food, India still has the highest percentage of underweight children under five. For this India is working hard to overcome this situation till 2020. But as India still falls behind in maintaining the required Global Hunger Index, the poor people count will remain as such. According to the Global Hunger Index Report 2012 by the International Food Research Institute, India ranks 97th in Global Hunger Index.

One of the root cause of poverty is high population growth rate. This further give rise to the Limited access to financial resources, worse health care facilities, high level of illiteracy,