Poverty in India, I think this will be the right subject for thought of the day,,,,, and I am presumed that You know why .... .
Poverty is widespread in India, with the nation estimated to have a third of the world's poor. According to a 2005 World Bank estimate, 41.6% of the total Indian population falls below the international poverty line of US$ 1.25 a day (PPP, in nominal terms 21.6 a day in urban areas and 14.3 in rural areas).
A recent report by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative ( OPHI ) states that 8 Indian states have more poor than 26 poorest African nations combined which totals to more than 410 million poor in the poorest African countries.
Importance of today for Indian people: -
In India, Republic Day commemorates the date on which the Constitution of India came into force replacing the Government of India Act 1935 as the governing document of India on 26 January 1950.
The 26th of January was chosen to honour the memory of the declaration of independence of 1930. It is one of the three national holidays in India. While the main parade takes place in the national capital New Delhi at the Rajpath before the president, the anniversary is also celebrated with varying degrees of formality in state capitals and other centers.
Now definitely the question arises why this independent country is considered as poor.
Causes of poverty: -
Corruption is the main cause of poverty in India. There is also a high population growth rate, although demographers generally agree that this is a symptom rather than cause of poverty.
While services and industry have grown at double digit figures, agriculture growth rate has dropped from 4.8% to 2%.
About sixty percent of the population depends on agriculture whereas the contribution of agriculture to the GDP is about eighteen percent. The surplus of labour in agriculture has caused many people to not have jobs.
Farmers are a large vote bank and use their votes to resist reallocation of land for higher-income industrial projects.
Caste system
According to S. M. Michael, Dalits (Belongs to lowest social and ritual class in India.) constitute the bulk of poor and unemployed. According to William A. Haviland, casteism (The prejudice that Social status or position conferred by a system based on class in India, or in more easy words you can say it as racism) is widespread in rural areas, and continues to segregate Dalits.
Others, however, have noted the steady rise and empowerment of the Dalits through social reforms and the implementation of reservations in employment and benefits.
Caste explanations of poverty fail to account for the urban/rural divide. Using the UN definition of poverty, 65% of rural forward castes are below the poverty line.
India's economic policies
In 1947, the average annual income in India was US$439, compared with US$619 for China, US$770 for South Korea, and US$936 for Taiwan. By 1999, the numbers were US$1,818; US$3,259; US$13,317; and US$15,720, respectively. (numbers are in 1990 international Maddison dollars). In other words, the average income in India was not much different from South Korea in 1947, but South Korea became a developed country by 2000s. At the same time, India was left as one of the world's poorer countries.
License Raj refers to the elaborate licenses, regulations and the accompanying red tape that were required to set up and run business in India between 1947 and 1990. The License Raj was a result of India's decision to have a planned economy, where all aspects of the economy are controlled by the state and licenses were given to a select few.
Corruption flourished under this system.
The labyrinthine bureaucracy often led to absurd restrictions - up to 80 agencies had to be satisfied before a firm could be granted a licence to produce and the state would decide what was produced, how much, at what price and what sources of capital were used.
—BBC
India had started out in the 1950s with: high growth rates, openness to trade and investment, a promotional state, social expenditure awareness and macro stability but ended the 1980s with: low growth rates, closure to trade and investment, a license-obsessed, restrictive state (License Raj), inability to sustain social expenditures and macro instability, indeed crisis.
Poverty has decreased significantly since reforms were started in the 1980s.
Liberalization policies and their effects
Other points of view hold that the economic reforms[clarification needed] initiated in the early 1990s are responsible for the collapse of rural economies and the agrarian crisis currently underway. As journalist and the Rural Affairs editor for The Hindu, P Sainath describes in his reports on the rural economy in India, the level of inequality has risen to extraordinary levels, when at the same time, hunger in India has reached its highest level in decades. He also points out that rural economies across India have collapsed, or on the verge of collapse due to the neo-liberal policies of the government of India since the 1990s. The human cost of the "liberalisation" has been very high.
The huge wave of farm suicides in Indian rural population from 1997 to 2007 totaled close to 200,000, according to official statistics. That number remains disputed, with some saying the true number is much higher. Commentators have faulted the policies pursued by the government which, according to Sainath, resulted in a very high portion of rural households getting into the debt cycle, resulting in a very high number of farm suicides. As professor Utsa Patnaik, India’s top economist on agriculture, has pointed out, the average poor family in 2007 has about 100 kg less food per year than it did in 1997.
Government policies encouraging farmers to switch to cash crops, in place of traditional food crops, has resulted in an extraordinary increase in farm input costs, while market forces determined the price of the cash crop. Sainath points out that a disproportionately large number of affected farm suicides have occurred with cash crops, because with food crops such as rice, even if the price falls, there is food left to survive on. He also points out that inequality has reached one of the highest rates India has ever seen. In a report by Chetan Ahya, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley, it is pointed out that there has been a wealth increase of close to US$1 Trillion in the time frame of 2003-2007 in the Indian stock market, while only 4-7% of the Indian population hold any equity. During the time when Public investment in agriculture shrank to 2% of the GDP, the nation suffered the worst agrarian crisis in decades, the same time as India became the nation of second highest number of dollar billionaires. Sainath argues that
Farm incomes have collapsed. Hunger has grown very fast. Public investment in agriculture shrank to nothing a long time ago. Employment has collapsed. Non-farm employment has stagnated. (Only the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has brought some limited relief in recent times.) Millions move towards towns and cities where, too, there are few jobs to be found.
In one estimate, over 85 per cent of rural households are either landless, sub-marginal, marginal or small farmers. Nothing has happened in 15 years that has changed that situation for the better. Much has happened to make it a lot worse.
Those who have taken their lives were deep in debt – peasant households in debt doubled in the first decade of the neoliberal “economic reforms,” from 26 per cent of farm households to 48.6 per cent. Meanwhile, all along, India kept reducing investment in agriculture (standard neoliberal procedure). Life was being made more and more impossible for small farmers.
As of 2006, the government spends less than 0.2% of GDP on agriculture and less than 3% of GDP on education. However, some government schemes such as the mid-day meal scheme, and the NREGA have been partially successful in providing a lifeline for the rural economy and curbing the further rise of poverty.
These are all statistics and study materials
Can you conclude it like this !
Poverty is becoming hereditary in India, at least for a sizeable population !
