Question

wt r d different indictors of poverty in india?

Answer 1

When poverty is endemic, it is very hard to select a few districts that ideally should be the poorest of the poor. "It is difficult to identify the poorest districts as the lists prepared by government agencies or independent institutions cannot claim to be entirely correct due to their arbitrary parameters. Parameters concerned to the people of specific area are important," says Jean Dreze, honorary professor, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics, New Delhi.

Down To Earth primarily sourced districts from a list of 100 poorest districts in India prepared by the Planning Commission. But to make the list a more wide in geographical area and also to get those districts that have reported large-scale environmental degradation, a host of other indicators were taken into finalise the 10 poorest districts.

STEP I: The Planning Commission"s list of 100 poorest districts was compared to the the National Sample Survey Organisation"s (NSSO) ranking of the 10 poorest states.

STEP II: Experts and state planning boards consulted to check out every district for their poverty ratio and also their ecological wealth. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy"s districts profile was checked for every district"s resources base.

STEP III: The Forest Survey of India report on forest cover and India"s first survey of common property resources were used to assess the environmental degradation. The Food Insecurity Atlas of India of the M S Swaminathan Foundation, Chennai, was employed to know further the food security scenario and also the environmental sustainability of these districts.

STEP IV: A list of 13 districts from nine states is finally prepared and World Bank developed poverty-environment indicators to judge the relationship between the two is applied to these districts. Out of these 13, 10 districts were chosen for reporting of which six have been profiled in this article.