Poverty in India
Poverty is one of the major problems in India. It is the root cause of many socio-economic problems including population explosion, unemployment, and child labour and rising graph of crimes. Poverty alleviation should be the main target of the nation so as to make it a prosperous and developed country. Thus, poverty elimination is a matter of fundamental importance.
Poverty implies a condition in which a person finds him unable to maintain a living standard adequate for his physical and mental efficiency. He even fails to meet his basic requirements. Poverty is in fact a relative concept. It is very difficult to draw a demarcation line between affluence and poverty. According to Adam Smith, “Man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, the conveniences and the amusements of human life.”
The pathos of Indian story is that 220-230 million of Indian population, which constitutes 22 per cent of the total population, is poor, as per the findings of the National Sample Survey Organization. This makes India home to the world’s largest proportion of the poor, even if the percentage of the people living below poverty line reduced from 36 per cent in 1993-194 to 22 per cent in 2004-05. The problem of poverty is acute in villages. More than 75 per cent people live in villages. Even prevalence of poverty is not uniform all across India. The poverty level is below 10 per cent in states like Delhi, Goa, Punjab, etc. while it is nearly 50 per cent in socio-economically backward states like Bihar and Orissa. The percentage of poverty fluctuates between 30 to 40 in north-eastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, and in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.
There are other dismal facts about poverty in this 4th largest economy of the world on GDP at Purchasing Power Parity: it ranks 126th out of 177 countries listed in the World Human...