The real picture

‘Garibi Hatao’ (Remove the poverty), the popular slogan initiated by the then Iron Lady, India’s lone lady Prime-Minister, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, seems to have no significance in our political leader’s agenda. Presently India has one-third of entire world’s poor people. Hope the leaders, administrators do very well hear this voice of statistics. As estimated recently India is the home to roughly one-third of all poor people in the world.
Surprisingly India also has a higher proportion of its population living on less than $2 per day than even sub-Saharan Africa. That is perhaps the worrying news coming out of the World Bank’s latest survey on global poverty. The fine print of the estimate also shows that the rate of decline of poverty in India was faster during 1981-1990 than between 1990-2005. This findings are likely to give fresh ammunition to those who maintain that economic reforms, which started in 1991, have failed to reduce poverty at a faster rate.
According to the estimate, India has 456 million people living below the new international poverty line of $1.25 earning a day, which amounts around 42 percent of the Indian population. The number of Indian poor people also constitute one-third that is 33% of the global poor. 75.6% of the Indians live below the earning of $2 a day, which is most alarming. The estimate is based on recently recalculated Purchasing Power Party (PPP) exchange rates, which makes comparison across countries possible.
A briefing note by the World Bank shows that the poverty rate for India fell from 59.8% to 51.3% by 1990- a 8.5% points over nine years. But during 1990-2005, the decline in poverty rate was much slower as we expected. Hence the economic reform did not have much impact on reduction of poverty. Even various poverty elimination programmes as well did not fare better as projected. So without much delay, let us understand the situation & work rigidly to eliminate poverty in actual terms.