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TOPIC:
General Studies 1
General Studies 2
India is uniquely placed to drive global poverty reduction. It is home to the largest number of poor people in the world, as well as the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. Despite an emerging middle class, many of India’s people are still vulnerable to falling back into poverty. Now, the next five years are crucial in solving major problems of India, one of them being poverty. A country where a quarter of population is below poverty line and large population which lives in rural India, the time has come to take concrete and resolute steps to eradicate poverty.
What can be done to reduce poverty?
Employment elasticity is going down. Per unit of growth, number of jobs being created across the board is going down.
Is it possible to have such ambitious target?
Thus, the government has the capability and capacity to undertake a huge reform for alleviating poverty, provided it has required resources-time, human, financial and institutional.
Conclusion
In a recent radio address, PM asked for six issues to resolve- 3 Cs (Communalism, Corruption, Casteism) and other three being terrorism, poverty and cleanliness.
Focussing on poverty, government can have public employment programme as a sucker but this cannot be a permanent solution. Structural changes are necessary for sustainable growth.
The target of eliminating poverty in next five years is an ambitious target. Going by the historical data, well over 5% growth in post reforms India, the number of people taken out of poverty line is 250 million going by 23-25% of poverty level. Now the task is very difficult.
There is need to have faster growth. India’s growth has been reasonable but may not be equitable in a sense that large population of India which depends on agriculture has not grown rapidly whereas services has taken the lead and industry is behind it. Thus there is a skew in growth pattern where 50-60% people dependent on agriculture are growing at slow rate and higher in other sectors. The disparities are there and the distribution of benefits in not happening in an equitable way. For equitable growth, there is a need to have improvement in investments in projects, manufacturing and infrastructure.
Economic survey talked about UBI. The genesis is that there is lot of subsidisation in schemes which could be withdrawn and instead the basic money is given to them through bank accounts of the beneficiary. It may not be able to implement it fully for everybody though there can be pilot basis experimentation.
India is home to 26% of the global extreme poor. This means that the world’s ability to end extreme poverty by 2030 — an objective originally adopted by the World Bank and now a key element of the Sustainable Development Goals — depends on India’s ability to make strong and sustained inroads in reducing poverty. The poverty challenge in India remains broad, and sometimes contradictory. Even though there is an emerging middle class, many people who have escaped poverty are not yet economically secure, living very close to the poverty line. Furthermore, when the definition of poverty is expanded beyond what people consume to include other dimensions of well-being such as access to education, health care and basic infrastructure, poverty has a grip on a much larger proportion of India’s people.
Connecting the dots: