Question

Explain the features and types of poverty in india

Answer 1

Meaning: Poverty can be defined as the lack of basic needs that are necessary for one to lead a relatively comfortable life. Such requirements may include shelter, clothing, food, education, and healthcare.

Poverty can either be relative or absolute because whereas other people may be comfortable with their lives, they may be deemed to be living in poverty when compared against those who are extremely wealthy.

There are two types of pooverty:-
1. Absolute pooverty
2. Relative pooverty
Absolute poverty is measured against a pre-determined level of living that families should be able to afford. Consumption of food grains, vegetables, milk products and other items that are necessary for a healthy living and access to other non-food items are included in the absolute minimum consumption basket.

These standards are then converted into monetary units and defined as the poverty line. People with consumption expenditure below this threshold are considered poor.

Relative poverty is closely associated with the issues of inequality. The income or consumption of the last quintile of the population would be termed poor even though on absolute poverty definition non of the people in the last quintile group may be poor. Per capita income of a country could also be used to identify the poor.

Persons with per capita incomes of half the country’s per capita income could be termed as poor even though they may be in a position to afford the minimum basket of goods and services that may represent the poverty line. This again reflects concerns of equality.

Relative poverty is thus different from absolute poverty, which looks more at a household’s consumption, or income available for it to meet its minimum consumption needs.

Measure to reduce pooverty.

The most common measure of poverty is to count the number of persons below the poverty line and express it as a percentage of total population in the country. This is known as the head-count measure of poverty or head-count ratio.

While this measure is simple and readily understandable its main weakness is that it gives equal weight to all the poor irrespective of their distance from the poverty line. The marginally poor and the very poor are treated equally In the head count ratio.

Amartya Sen has suggested a measure popularly known as Sen’s measure of poverty, which removes the above weakness of the head-count measure. His measure takes into account not only the number of the poor, but the intensity of poverty as well. The intensity of poverty is reflected by a concept known as the poverty gap, which shows how far a poor person falls short from the poverty line.

In other words, it is the difference between the poverty line and the income of the poor. Sen’s index is a weighted sum of poverty gaps of all the poor, the weights being such that less poor persons get lower weight than those who are poorer.

This measure is normalized so that it lies between 0 and 1. This means that the index is on an ascending scale between 0 and 1. A higher value of Sen’s index implies a higher Incidence of poverty. This index can be higher or lower for the same head count measure of poverty depending upon the distribution of the poor between less and more poor.

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Answer 2

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