Can india eradicate poverty

The target of the government is to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere by View in App. Follow Us. Story highlights October 17 is observed as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty as it provides an opportunity to analyse the efforts made to eliminate poverty.

Shortage of fertiliser poses fresh problems for Indian farmers ahead of sowing season. India-made Covid vaccine Covaxin is Read in App. The next generation of most poor households are also poor; in fact, the intensity and distress is greater. Also, the new generation is without access or with restricted access to livelihood resources such as land, forest and water. With an apology to biologists, poverty has arguably become genetic. If caste and religion were two default hereditary burdens, poverty is the next.

In the next two years, poverty would be eradicated, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised. Modi made the promise on September 25, at a national executive meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In November , the Union government stopped the release of a consumption expenditure survey that would have indicated the exact level of poverty in the country. The 75 th round survey of the National Statistical Office — done every five years — on consumer expenditure was leaked to the media.

Consumption expenditure is used as a proxy for income in India, in turn forming the basis for measuring poverty. States rather slipped in their efforts to reduce poverty in , in comparison to Those are the states that have been traditionally marked as the geography of poverty in India.

This raises the pertinent question: Why are we not able to raise people above the poverty line despite pumping in huge funds into anti-poverty programmes?

First, our poverty reduction rate is not adequate, given the level of poverty: India has million poor according to the last poverty count. Third, we may be temporarily raising people above poverty levels, but not being able to keep them there. While the above scenarios play out together, a significant number of poor have turned chronic poor. While chronic poverty is dynamic in that people do climb out of, or fall into poverty in significant numbers, exiting such poverty can prove difficult.

During the last two decades, India has implemented several social protection programmes with the aim to improve living standards, and these have helped the Indian government in poverty reduction. Existing evidence suggests that there is a strong correlation between urban economic growth and poverty reduction Datt et al.

This evidence suggests that poverty reduction is shaped mainly by structural transformation and increased spending on social protection programmes. From a critical lens, certainly, each social protection programme and CSS suffers from an array of difficulties — such as rigidity, non-adaptability to local conditions, late disbursement of funds, reallocation of funds to unrelated recurring expenditure, and wide-ranging rent-seeking practices. Though the objective was to enhance the transparency and faster transmission of transfers to beneficiaries, the DBT has been criticised by well-known economists and social scientists.

Both have rolled up their sleeves for getting into action to tackle this pandemic which has also led to the imposition of a nation-wide lockdown from 24 March — 31 May , which disrupted the informal economy and created an unprecedented reverse migration of workers.

The effects of the COVID crisis on low-skilled migrant labourers and informal workers have been overwhelming. Early evidence suggests that there has been a massive increase in unemployment and an equally dramatic fall in earnings. With millions of migrant workers having returned to their home in rural areas, and the pandemic continuing to bring heavy tolls on the Indian economy and jobs particularly those in the informal sector , schemes like MGNREGA are being sought out by governments and desperate citizens as an immediate measure to tackle employment and poverty.

Additionally, to reduce the hardship of these migrant workers and for giving relief to the informal economy, the Indian government has recently launched Garib Kalyan Rozgar Abhiyan GKRA. GKRA was launched this year on 20 June and is aimed at providing employment benefits of days to return migrants across districts in six states of India.