In our daily life, we come across people
who we think are poor . They could be landless labours in village or
people living in around us in overcrowded urban area living in the
slums. It could our housemaid, driver, gardener, sweeper etc. The list
is endless which made us realise that we are surrounded by poverty around
us. In fact in India around 3 crores people living under poverty line.
Poverty is one of key challenges India is facing today.Generally poverty
is related to following issues like - unemployment, landlessness, size
of family illiteracy , poor health, child labour and helplessness.
Unemployment
is directly related to poverty. Unemployment is when person is unemployed or active seeking for work.There are various type of
unemployment. Some of them are seasonal and some is hidden unemployment.
In seasonal unemployment person is unemployed for a season. It is common
in rural areas. In rural areas, many farmers are landless. They usually
work on farmers having large farms which give them seasonal
employment for their living during cultivation period.
There
are four factors of production - land , labour, physical capital and
human capital. Among these four factors of production human capital is
most important. most developed countries invest on their human capital.
they emphasis on providing their citizen skills and knowledge which can
be a contributor in national income. The major problem with poor people
is that they are uneducated. They do not have skills and knowledge which
them to break the shackles of poverty. For example if the labour is
uneducated and poor. he will not have enough resource to educate their
children which make their children uneducated and poor in future.
Whereas educated people knows the importance of education very much.They
give much importance to education. They believe giving education to
children is an investment for bright future of their children and
country.
Economist find poverty
based person occupation and their asserts.In pre independence, Dada
Bhai Naoroji first time discuss poverty and poverty line. he gave a
rough formulae to calculate poverty line. After independence, many
planning commission and committee define poverty and poverty line. Indra
Gandhi also gave the slogan in seventy garibi hatao. But we have failed
in eradicating poverty till now and still it is a menace.In India, poverty
live not only in rural area but it is present largely in urban area.
Poverty in urban India is more as compare to rural India. In ninety,
rural poverty has decreased but urban poverty has increased. The reason
for this is shift is migration of people from rural area to urban area
and increase in population.
The
problem of poverty is not associated with India only. it is a global
problem.About one fifth of the global population is poor. Many latin
american countries and african countries are facing the problem of
poverty. Namibia has largest number of poor than other countries of the
world.International agencies has set up the global poverty line of 1
dollar per day. in India, if a person is earning less than 37 rupee in
rural area and 47 rupee in urban area that it is considered as poor.The condition is improving slowly with various step taken by Govt of India. Various schemes are formulated to eradicate in this decade.