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Definition of poverty

Condition where people's basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter are not being
met. Poverty is generally of two types: (1) Absolute poverty is synonymous with
destitution and occurs when people cannot obtain adequate resources (measured
in terms of calories or nutrition) to support a minimum level of physical health.
Absolute poverty means about the same everywhere, and can be eradicated as
demonstrated by some countries. (2) Relative poverty occurs when people do not
enjoy a certain minimum level of living standards as determined by
a government (and enjoyed by the bulk of the population) that vary from country to
country, sometimes within the same country. Relative poverty occurs everywhere,
is said to be increasing, and may never be eradicated.
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What is poverty?
Poverty is about not having enough money to meet basic needs including food,
clothing and shelter. However, poverty is more, much more than just not having
enough money.
The World Bank Organization describes poverty in this way:
Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not
being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not
knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future,
living one day at a time.
Poverty has many faces, changing from place to place and across time, and
has been described in many ways. Most often, poverty is a situation people
want to escape. So poverty is a call to action -- for the poor and the wealthy
alike -- a call to change the world so that many more may have enough to
eat, adequate shelter, access to education and health, protection from
violence, and a voice in what happens in their communities.
In addition to a lack of money, poverty is about not being able to participate in
recreational activities; not being able to send children on a day trip with their
schoolmates or to a birthday party; not being able to pay for medications for an
illness. These are all costs of being poor. Those people who are barely able to pay
for food and shelter simply cant consider these other expenses. When people are

excluded within a society, when they are not well educated and when they have a
higher incidence of illness, there are negative consequences for society. We all
pay the price for poverty. The increased cost on the health system, the justice
system and other systems that provide supports to those living in poverty has an
impact on our economy.
While much progress has been made in measuring and analyzing poverty, the
World Bank Organization is doing more work to identify indicators for the other
dimensions of poverty. This work includes identifying social indicators to track
education, health, access to services, vulnerability, and social exclusion.
There is no one cause of poverty, and the results of it are different in every case.
Poverty varies considerably depending on the situation. Feeling poor in Canada is
different from living in poverty in Russia or Zimbabwe. The differences between
rich and poor within the borders of a country can also be great.
Despite the many definitions, one thing is certain; poverty is a complex societal
issue. No matter how poverty is defined, it can be agreed that it is an issue that
requires everyones attention. It is important that all members of our society work
together to provide the opportunities for all our members to reach their full
potential. It helps all of us to help one another .
Characteristic of poverty
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Health
Education
Hunger
Housing
Utilities
Violence

Poverty reduction steps


1- Increasing the supply of basic needs
Food and other goods
Agricultural technologies such as nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and new irrigation
methods have dramatically reduced food shortages in modern times by boosting
yields past previous constraints.

Before the Industrial Revolution poverty had been mostly accepted as inevitable
as economies produced little, making wealth scarce.
2- Health care and education
Nations do not necessarily need wealth to gain health. For example, Sri
Lanka had a maternal mortality rate of 2% in the 1930s, higher than any
nation today. It reduced it to 0.50.6% in the 1950s and to .06% today while
spending less each year on maternal health because it learned what worked
and what did not. Cheap water filters and promoting hand washing are some
of the most cost effective health interventions and can
cutdeaths from diarrhea and pneumonia. Knowledge on the cost
effectiveness of healthcare interventions can be elusive and educational
measures have been made to disseminate what works, such as
the Copenhagen Consensus.
Strategies to provide education cost effectively include deworming children,
which costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces non-attendance
from anemia, illness and malnutrition, while being only a twenty-fifth as
expensive as increasing school attendance by constructing schools.
Schoolgirl absenteeism could be cut in half by simply providing free sanitary
towels
3- Reversing brain drain
The loss of basic needs providers emigrating from impoverished countries has a
damaging effect. As of 2004, there were more Ethiopia-trained doctors living in
Chicago than in Ethiopia. Proposals to mitigate the problem by the World Health
Organization include compulsory government service for graduates of public
medical and nursing schools and creating career-advancing programs to retain
personnel.
4- Controlling overpopulation
Some argue that overpopulation and lack of access to birth control leads to
population increase to exceed food production and other resources. Better
education for both men and women, and more control of their lives, reduces
population growth due to family planning.

5- Increasing personal income


The following are strategies used or proposed to increase personal incomes among
the poor. Raising farm incomes is described as the core of the antipoverty effort as
three quarters of the poor today are farmers.

Rural poverty in India


The number of poor people in India, according to the countrys Eleventh National
Development Plan, amounts to more than 300 million. The country has been
successful in reducing the proportion of poor people from about 55 per cent in
1973 to about 27 per cent in 2004.
But almost one third of the countrys population of more than 1.1 billion continues
to live below the poverty line, and a large proportion of poor people live in rural
areas. Poverty remains a chronic condition for almost 30 per cent of Indias rural
population. The incidence of rural poverty has declined somewhat over the past
three decades as a result of rural to urban migration.
Poverty is deepest among members of scheduled castes and tribes in the country's
rural areas. In 2005 these groups accounted for 80 per cent of poor rural people,
although their share in the total rural population is much smaller.
On the map of poverty in India, the poorest areas are in parts of Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.
Large numbers of India's poorest people live in the country's semi-arid tropical
region. In this area shortages of water and recurrent droughts impede the
transformation of agriculture that the Green Revolution has achieved elsewhere.
There is also a high incidence of poverty in flood-prone areas such as those
extending from eastern Uttar Pradesh to the Assam plains, and especially in
northern Bihar.
Poverty affects tribal people in forest areas, where loss of entitlement to resources
has made them even poorer. In coastal fishing communities people's living
conditions are deteriorating because of environmental degradation, stock depletion
and vulnerability to natural disasters.

A major cause of poverty among Indias rural people, both individuals and
communities, is lack of access to productive assets and financial resources. High
levels of illiteracy, inadequate health care and extremely limited access to social
services are common among poor rural people. Microenterprise development,
which could generate income and enable poor people to improve their living
conditions, has only recently become a focus of the government.
Women in general are the most disadvantaged people in Indian society, though
their status varies significantly according to their social and ethnic backgrounds.
Women are particularly vulnerable to the spread of HIV/AIDS from urban to rural
areas. In 2005 an estimated 5.7 million men, women and children in India were
living with HIV/AIDS. Most of them are in the 15-49 age group and almost 40 per
cent of them, or 2.4 million in 2008, are women (National AIDS Control
Organisation).

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