POVERTY AND SOCIAL LIFE

    "POVERTY AND SOCIAL LIFE"

                             In this blog I am going to discuss with you about poverty and how poverty is measured and about some government schemes. Now the biggest question in our mind is what is meant by poverty ?

Poverty: It is the state of not having enough income for a person's basic needs. Poverty stricken people and families might go without proper housing, clean water, healthy food, and medical attention. A poor person is not able to get education due to lack of money and An unemployed person is not able to buy enough nutritious food for his family. A jobless person remains poor only. Thus we can say that poverty is the root cause of other problems. For many people like this they remain in this cycle of poverty for the rest of their lives.  Ijeoma Ndukwe, the CEO of Bubez Food Ltd, who with just #200 (less than a dollar) in 2006, started selling pap in the comfort of her home and was able to raise the business into a multi-million-naira food processing and packaging industry today, by creatively thinking of how to process and hygienically package pap to other nations of the world. When asked how she was able to alleviate poverty. She said that “a poor man is not one that lacks money; but a man that lacks ideas.”

  HOW POVERTY IS MEASURED IN INDIA

          In India The planning commission field an affidavit in the supreme court updating about poverty line to Rs 965 per month in urban areas and Rs 781 in rural areas. This works out to Rs 32 and and Rs 26 per day.

          The official poverty line is determined by the Planning Commission, on the basis of data provided by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO). NSSO data is based on a survey of consumer expenditure which takes place every five years.  The most recent Planning Commission poverty estimates are for the year 2004-05. In addition to Planning Commission efforts to determine the poverty line, the Ministry of Rural Development has conducted a BPL Census in 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2011 to identify poor households. The BPL(Below poverty line) Census is used to target families for assistance through various schemes of the central government. The 2011 BPL Census is being conducted along with a caste census, and is dubbed the Socio-Economic & Caste Census (SECC) 2011. Details on the methodology of SECC 2011 are available in this short Ministry of Rural Development circular. The Indian poverty line claims to be anchored in a “nutritional norm:” it is based on notions of what is a basic minimum of nutrition an individual must obtain every day in order not to be considered undernourished. Data from the National Sample Survey Office’s data on consumption expenditure are typically used to draw up this poverty line. We have in these surveys information on the consumption of the population (measured in money terms) in different expenditure classes (intervals of expenditure from low to high). We can obtain from the information on the food consumed in each of these classes, estimates of the calorie value of this food. These estimates can be employed to obtain a picture of calorie consumption that typically increases as consumption spending itself rises. The graph of calorie consumption as a function of consumption spending can be employed to read off the level of consumption expenditure per individual per day at which the nutritional norm is actually achieved.

GOVERNMENT SCHEMES TO REDUCE POVERTY 

        Government launched 4 poverty alleviation schemes in India for rural development 

1.National Rural livelihood Mission(NRLM) : was launched in 2011 by the Ministry of Rural Development and aided by the World Bank. The mission aims at harnessing the innate capabilities of the poor and complements them with providing them the capacity to participate in the growing economy of the country. In 2015, the program was renamed to Deendayal Antayodaya Yojana (DAY-NRLM).

2.The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (MNREGA) :  To ensure social inclusion, women gain priority — such that some 33% of the beneficiaries under this scheme are women. Moreover, the robust institutions for grievance redressal and social auditing guarantee accountability and transparency.

3.Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) : Through this scheme, the government commits to realizing housing for all, by 2022. The aim is to provide solid and permanent housing with all the basic amenities including toilet, LPG connection, electricity connection and drinking water.

4.Public Distribution System (PDS) : The primary goal is to distribute essential food commodities like rice, wheat and kerosene at highly subsidized rates to the people living below the poverty line. This poverty alleviation scheme helps in addressing the issue of food insecurity in rural areas of India.

           According to the 2019 U.N. Human Development Report, 27.9% of the population in India is multidimensionally poor. With proper implementation of the poverty alleviation schemes, India can reduce poverty by empowering the rural poor with optimal use and management of resources. These schemes focus on targeting the multidimensional deprivations the poor face by providing them with food security, employment, housing and wages.

THERE HAS 7 STEPS TO STOP POVERTY:

1.Create Awareness: Social media has become an integral part of daily life, and now is the time to use it as a voice of social good. Sharing links on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms will allow people to learn more about global poverty and will increase the general consciousness of the issue.
2.Take Action on Your Own: There are a few simple ways we can help as individuals, such as funding a poor child’s education or by sponsoring a poor family and influencing others to do so. Raising money and donating it to a nonprofit can help as well.
3.Donate: Donations can help in so many ways. They do not always have to take the form of money. This can include donating books to a poor child or buying groceries for a poor family for a week to help fight hunger. Donating old clothes, furniture and toiletries can also help improve the well-being of the poor.
4.Eliminate Gender Inequality: With two-thirds of the world’s illiterate being female, the ratio of boys and girls should be made equal in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Girls that attend school are less likely to get married before age 18, thus decreasing child marriage rates by 64 percent worldwide. Similarly, literate women are less likely to spread diseases like HIV/AIDS due to a better knowledge of disease transmission, which helps to accelerate poverty reduction in the long run.
5.Create Jobs Worldwide: According to the International Labor Organization, 197 million people are without work worldwide. More employment options in a country mean more ways of how to stop poverty. To increase employment, non-literate people can be taught a few skills to make them employable.
6.Increase Access to Proper Sanitation and Clean Water: Access to clean water and sanitation directly affects health and education. Currently, 800 million people live without access to safe water and 2.5 billion live without adequate sanitation. Dirty bathrooms keep girls from attending schools, thus stopping them from receiving an education. Lack of clean water spreads diseases like diarrhea and cholera, which take the lives of more than one million children each year.
7.Educate Everyone: Education helps increase individual earnings for every member of a family. UNESCO points out that basic reading skills can lift 171 million people out of extreme poverty, ultimately reducing the world’s total poverty by 12 percent. UNESCO also mentions there are currently about one billion illiterate adults in the world.

Above are a few solutions about how to stop poverty, but first, it is important to understand the roots of the problems that cause poverty. Since different countries have different reasons for poverty, there will never be a single solution for all. However, these seven actions can do a lot to alleviate poverty anywhere.