Alex Stourton

World Cultures
April 14 2015
NAHC X:_________________
Ending Poverty in India

India has a great percentage of people in poverty struggling to get enough money to
survive. Millions of lives depend on what the government can do for them and most are never
helped in their lives because India is a large nation with so many poor people that it is hard to
reach all of them.The government of India has the greatest ability out of any world organization
to end the poverty in their nation. Indias government needs to step up and put more of its effort
into ending this chronic problem that has lasted for centuries.

First, the current situation in India is not as good as many countries due to the dense
population, so much so that it is 9 times more densely populated than the United States of
America. Due to this density it has caused widespread poverty and lack of nourishment. 54% of
people in India were stunted as children so they have less ability to work in the field. Farming is
what most of the poor live off of, making it worse for the people in this situation (Glassman
2013). The reliance on the farmland is bad for the populations of the poor because the land is
prone to drought with the commonness of late monsoon seasons. Some major droughts have
had greater impacts on India. In 1987 300 million were affected by the drought. Another cause
of death was from famine resulting from the unproductivity of the land (India 2013). These
droughts have become more common and deadly over the past few centuries due to more
people relying on the land to be productive for more people. The poverty in India is also much
larger than the government of India says. They say there are only 350 million people below the
poverty line; however, india has a different poverty line than the rest of the world uses, so that

alone still equals of the population (Poverty 2011). Indias poverty line is equivalent to 56
American cents per day ($204.4 per year) lower than the world poverty line making India look
like it has less [poverty than it really does (Glassman). As compared to China, even while using
Indias low poverty line India still has a significantly larger amount of poor people than Indias
larger counterpart (Poverty 2011). About a fifth of women still are married by the age of 15 due
to the poverty (Glassman 2013).

Indias government has not ignored the situation of poverty completely; however, it has
not put it as their top priority. Indias government always tries to benefit the majority to get back
representatives into office instead of benefiting the lowest of the population that needs it the
most. The government has provided 14 billion dollars worth of money to stopping poverty which
is less than 1% of the GDP. In 2010 even in the 1% only 30% of the money went to the poor the
other went to the population that is the majority for voting giving the government good reason
to give it to them (Glassman). The 14 billion was given in the form of discounted fertilizer and
food, and another reason it failed to give the discounts to only the poor was because of lack of
proper administration and rich taking advantage of the situation (Glassman 2013). The
government was recently accused of helping districts that voted for the ruling party in the
government at the time. The Indian government has not been helping the nation cope well with
the situation by having multiple frauds and not supporting the poor as the countrys main priority
and should also provide more money to the poor in order for them to be better off (Glassman).

India has been a troubled place over the past hundred years or so with immense
poverty, lots of religious tension that has broken the nation, and caused fighting between the
two separated nations, and endless famines some of which had wiped out a of the
populations of the affected areas. Some of these things are improving over time however for a
nation this large some things will always get worse and some get better all the time. For the

GDP per capita in India has risen dramatically, having risen from 460 to 1489 dollars worth of
money per person seeming a good improvement however then plummeting back down in less
time than it rose and down to 714.72 48% less than the highest of the decade (Glassman). The
poverty as of the population is bad enough, in 1981 though 54.31% of the population lived in
poverty which can be seen as improvement however that of the population is less than the
of the population in poverty today (Poverty 2011). The old way that India distributed money was
through bank accounts. Only a small fraction of the poor people in India that need the money
didn't have the bank accounts necessary to obtain the money only 21% did have them. Now
however they have a different system by giving the poor ID numbers that distribute the money to
them easily. By December of 2012 240 million poor people have these ID numbers making it
easy for the poor to receive money (Glassman). India is close to surpassing China in population
which can cause overcrowding and less resources which will make a larger percentage of
people in poverty. A good thing in comparison with China is that India is becoming more
powerful than China which can lead to more wealth for the government to be able to afford to
use to end poverty (Poverty 2011)

Mostly India is on the right track for ending its poverty crisis, the government however
should put more emphasis on this problem. Most of the problem that has been so far solved has
not been solved by government intervention however, but mostly by organizations that give
money to the poor. If the government helped more, the crisis would be over faster. This still will
be a problem if the Indian government cant cut down on scandals of supporting the majority
and improve the process of giving benefits to the poor.

Bibliography

Glassman Amanda and Birdsall Nancy "Can India Defeat Poverty?" Foreign Policy Can India

Defeat Poverty Comments. January 08, 2013. Accessed April 02, 2015.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/01/08/can-india-defeat-poverty/.

"India: The History Of Drought." India: The History Of Drought. Accessed April 08, 2015.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/India-The-History-Of-Drought/209341.

"Poverty in India: Causes, Effects, Injustice & Exclusion." Poverties.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 09
Apr. 2015. http://www.poverties.org/poverty-in-india.html