Class 9 Economic chapter 4 notes | Study notes Economics

Chapter -4 Poverty as a challenge

Introduction

• In our daily life, we come across many people who we think as poor . They could be landless

laborates in village or people living in overcrowded jhuggis in cities.

• They could be daily wages workers at construction site or child worker in dhabas. They could

also be beggers with children in tatters.

• In fact , every fourth person in India is poor. This means roughly to 70 million people in India

live in poverty according to 2011-12 study.

Two Typical causes a property

Urban case

• 33 year old Ram Saran works as a daily-wage labourer in a wheat flour mill near Ranchi in

Jharkhand.

• He manages to earn around rupees 1500 a month when he find employment which is not

obtained the money is not enough to sustain his family of six- that include his wife and four

children is between 12 year to 6 month.

• He has to send money home to his old parent who live in a village near Ramgarh . His father a

landless laborat different on Ram Saran and his brother who live in Hazaribagh for sustenance.

• Ram Saran lives in a one room rented house in a crowded basti in the outskirts of the city. It is

a temporary shack build a bricks and clay tiles.

• His wife Santa Devi works as a part time maid in a few houses a manage to earn another

rupees 800.

• They manage a meagre meal of dal and rice twice a day but there is never enough for all of

them.

• His elder son was as a helper in a tea shop to supplement the family income and earn another

rupees 300 while is 10 year old daughter takes care of the younger siblings.

• None of the children go to school. They have only two pairs of hand-me-down clothes each.

• New ones were brought only when the old clothes become unwearable. Shoes are a luxury.

The younger kids are undernourished.

They have no access to healthcare when they fall ill.

Rural Case

• Lakha Singh belongs to a small village near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. His family does not own

any land , so they do odd jobs for the big farmer.

• Work work is erratic and so is income. At times they get paid rupees 50 for a hard days work.

But often it is in kind like a few kilogram of wheat or dal or even vegetables for toiling in the farm

through the day.

• The family of eight cannot always manage two square meals a day.

• Lakha lives in a kaccha hut on the outskirts of the village. The women of the families spend

the days chopping folders and collecting firewood in the fields.

• His father a TB patient passed away 2 years ago due to lack of medication. His mother now

suffer from the same digits and life is slowly ebbing away.

• Although the village has a primary school , Lakha never went there. He had to start earning

when he was 10 year old. Even soap and oil are a luxury for the family.

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• These to typical case illustrate many dimension of proverty. They show that property means

hunger and lack of shelter.

• It also is a situation in which parent are not able to send their children to school or a situation

where sick people cannot afford treatment. Property also main lack of clean water and sanitation

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Chapter -4 Poverty as a challenge Introduction

In our daily life, we come across many people who we think as poor. They could be landless laborates in village or people living in overcrowded jhuggis in cities.
They could be daily wages workers at construction site or child worker in dhabas. They could also be beggers with children in tatters.
In fact , every fourth person in India is poor. This means roughly to 70 million people in India live in poverty according to 2011-12 study. Two Typical causes a property Urban case
33 year old Ram Saran works as a daily-wage labourer in a wheat flour mill near Ranchi in Jharkhand.
He manages to earn around rupees 1500 a month when he find employment which is not obtained the money is not enough to sustain his family of six- that include his wife and four children is between 12 year to 6 month.
He has to send money home to his old parent who live in a village near Ramgarh. His father a landless laborat different on Ram Saran and his brother who live in Hazaribagh for sustenance.
Ram Saran lives in a one room rented house in a crowded basti in the outskirts of the city. It is a temporary shack build a bricks and clay tiles.
His wife Santa Devi works as a part time maid in a few houses a manage to earn another rupees 800.
They manage a meagre meal of dal and rice twice a day but there is never enough for all of them.
His elder son was as a helper in a tea shop to supplement the family income and earn another rupees 300 while is 10 year old daughter takes care of the younger siblings.
None of the children go to school. They have only two pairs of hand-me-down clothes each.
New ones were brought only when the old clothes become unwearable. Shoes are a luxury. The younger kids are undernourished. They have no access to healthcare when they fall ill. Rural Case
Lakha Singh belongs to a small village near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. His family does not own any land , so they do odd jobs for the big farmer.
Work work is erratic and so is income. At times they get paid rupees 50 for a hard days work. But often it is in kind like a few kilogram of wheat or dal or even vegetables for toiling in the farm through the day.
The family of eight cannot always manage two square meals a day.
Lakha lives in a kaccha hut on the outskirts of the village. The women of the families spend the days chopping folders and collecting firewood in the fields.
His father a TB patient passed away 2 years ago due to lack of medication. His mother now suffer from the same digits and life is slowly ebbing away.
Although the village has a primary school , Lakha never went there. He had to start earning when he was 10 year old. Even soap and oil are a luxury for the family.

These to typical case illustrate many dimension of proverty. They show that property means hunger and lack of shelter.
It also is a situation in which parent are not able to send their children to school or a situation where sick people cannot afford treatment. Property also main lack of clean water and sanitation

facilities.

It also mean lack of regular job at a minimum decent level. Our all living with a sense of helplessness.
Poor people are in a situation in which they are ill-treated at almost every places in farms, factories, government offices, hospitals ,railway station, etc.
Obviously nobody would like to live in poverty
One of the biggest challenge of independent India has become to bring million of its peoples out of abject poverty.
Mahatma Gandhi always insisted that India would be truly independent only when the poorest of its people become free of human suffering. Poverty As seen by social scientist •Since poverty has many facets , social scientist look at it through a variety of indicator.
Usually the indicated used related to the levels of income and consumption but now poverty is looked through other social indicator like illiteracy level, lack of general resistance, due to malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare, lack of job opportunities ,lack of access to save drinking water, sanitation etc.
Analysis of poverty based on social exclusion and vulnerable is now becoming very common. Social Exclusion •According to this concept, poverty must be seen in terms of the poor having to live only in a poor surrounding with other poor people, excluded from enjoying social equality of better-off people in better surroundings.
Social exclusion can be both a case as well as a consequence of proverty in the usual sense.
Broadly, it is a process through which individuals or groups are excluded from facilities, benefits and opportunities that others (their "betters") enjoy.
A typical example is the working of the caste system in India in which people belonging to certain castes are excluded from equal opportunities. •Social exclusion thus may lead to, but can cause more damage than, having a very low income. Vulnerability
Vulnerability to poverty is a measure. which describes the greater probability of certain communities (say, members of a backward caste) or individuals (such as a widow or a physically handicapped person) of becoming, or remaining,poor in the coming years.
Vulnerability is determined by the options available to different communities for finding an alternative living in terms of assets, education, health and job opportunities.
Further, it is analysed on the basis of the greater risks these groups face at the time of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunami), terrorism etc. •Additional analysis is made of their social and economic ability to handle these risks. •In fact, vulnerability describes the greater probability of being more adversely affected than other people when bad time comes for everybody, whether a flood or an earthquake or simply a fall in the availability of jobs! Poverty Line
A common method used to measure poverty is based on the income or consumption level. A person is considered poor if his or her income or consumption level falls below a given minimum level necessary to fuldill the basic need.
Each country uses an imaginary line that is considered appropriate for its existing level of development and its accepted minimum social norms.
For example a person not having a car in the United State may be considered poor. In India owning of a car is still considered a luxury.

Some recent studies have shown that except for the scheduled Tribes household, all the other three groups ie. Scheduled caste, rural agricultural labourers, and the urban labour household have seen a decline in poverty in the 1990s.
Apart from the social groups, there is also inequality of incomes within a family. In poor families all suffers, but some some suffers more than others.
In some cases women, elderly people and female infants are denied access to resources available to the family. Story of Sivaraman
Sivaraman lips in a small village near Karur town in Tamilnadu. Karur is famous for it handloom and powerloom fabrics.
There are a 100 families in the village. Sivaraman an Aryunthathiyar (cobbler) by caste now works as an agricultural labourer for Rs 160 per day.
But that's only for five to six months in a year. At other times, he does odd jobs in the town. •His wife Sasikala too works with him. But she can rarely find work these days, and even if she does, she's paid Rs 100 per day for the same work that Sivaraman does. •There are eight members in the family. Sivaraman's 65 year old widowed mother is ill and needs to be helped with her daily chores. He has a 25-year-old unmarried sister and four children aged between 1 year to 16 years. Three of them are girls, the youngest is a son.
None of the girls go to school. Buying books and other things for school-going girls is a luxury he cannot afford. •Also, he has to get them married at some point of time so he doesn't want to spend on their education now.
His mother has lost interest in life and is just waiting to die someday. •His sister and elder daughter take care of the household. •Sivaraman plans to send his son to school when he comes of age. •His unmarried sister does not get along with his wife. Sasikala finds her a burden but Sivaraman can't find a suitable groom due to lack of money.
Although the family has difficulty in arranging two meals a day. Sivaraman manages to buy milk once in a while, but only for his son. Inter-State Disparities
Poverty in India also has another aspect or dimension. The proportion of poor people is not the same in every state. •Although state level poverty has witnessed a secular decline from the levels of early seventies, the success rate of reducing poverty varies from state to state.
Recent estimates show while the all India Head Count Ratio (HCR) was 21.9 per cent in 2011-12 states like Madhya Pradesh,Assam, Uttar Pardesh,Bihar and Odisha had above all India poverty level.
Bihar and Odisha continue to be the two poorest states with poverty ratios of 33.7 and 32.6 per cent, respectively. •Along with rural poverty. urban poverty is also high in Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh." •In comparison, there has been a significant decline in poverty in Kerala, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh,Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and West Bengal.
States like Punjab and Haryana have traditionally succeeded in reducing poverty with the help of high agricultural growth rates. •Kerala has focused more on human resource development. •In West Bengal, land reform measures have helped in reducing poverty.

•In Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu public distribution of food grains could have been responsible for the improvement. Global Poverty Scenario •The proportion of people in different countries living in extreme economic poverty defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day-has fallen from 36 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 2015. •Although there has been a substantial reduction in global poverty. It is marked with great regional differences.

Poverty declined substantially in China and Southeast Asian countries as a result of rapid economic growth and massive investments in human resource development. •Number of poors in China has come down from 88.3 per cent in 1981 to 14.7 per cent in 2008 to 0.7 per cent in 2015. •In the countries of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan) the decline has also been rapid 34 per cent in 2005 to 16.2 per cent in 2013. •With decline in the percentage of the poor, the number of poor has also declined significantly from 510.4 million in 2005 to 274.5 million in 2013. •Because of different poverty line definition, poverty in India is also shown higher than the national estimates. In Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty in fact declined from 51 per cent in 2005 to 41 per cent in 2015.
In Latin America, the ratio of poverty has also declined from 10 per cent in 2005 to 4 per cent in 2015. •Poverty has also resurfaced in some of the former socialist countries like Russia, where officially it was non-existent earlier.
The proportion of people living under poverty in different countries as defined by the international poverty line (means population below $1.90 a day). Causes of Poverty •There were a number of causes for the widespread poverty in India. One historical reason is the low level of economic development under the British colonial administration. •The, policies of the colonial government ruined traditional handicrafts and discouraged development of industries like textiles. •The low rate of growth persisted until the nineteen- eighties. This resulted in less job opportunities and low growth rate of incomes.
This was accompanied by a high growth rate of population.
The two combined to make the growth rate of per capita income very low. •The fallure at both the fronts: promotion of economic growth and population control perpetuated the cycle of poverty.
With the spread of irrigation and the Green revolution, many job opportunities were created in the agriculture sector. But the effects were limited to some parts of India.
The industries, both in the public and the private sector. did provide some jobs. •But these were not enough to absorb all the job seekers. •Unable to find proper Jobs in cities, many people started working as rickshaw pullers, vendors, construction workers, domestic servants etc. •With irregular small incomes, these people could not afford expensive housing. •They started living in slums on the outskirts of the cities and the problems of poverty, largely a rural phenomenon also became the feature of the urban sector.

•One-third of the proposed jobs have been reserved for women. •The scheme provided employment to 220 crores person days of employment to 4.78 crore households. The share of SC,ST, Women person days in the scheme are 23 per cent. 17 per cent and 53 per cent respectively.

The average wage has increased from 65 in 2006-07 to 132 in 2013-14.
Recently, in March 2018, the wage rate for unskilled manual workers has been revised, state wise, the range of wage rate for different states and union territories lies in between 281 per day (for the workers in Haryana) to 168 per day (for the workers of Bihar and Jharkhand).
Prime Minister Rozgar Yozana (PMRY) is another scheme which was started in

The aim of the programme is to create self-employment opportunities for for educated unemployed youth in rural areas and small towns. •They are helped in setting up small business and industries. Rural Employment Generation Programme (REGP) was launched in 1995. •The aim of the programme is to create self- employment opportunities in rural areas and small towns. •A target for creating 25 lakh new jobs has been set for the programme under the Tenth Five Year plan. •Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) was launched in 1999. The programme aims at bringing the assisted poor families above the poverty line by organising them into self help groups through a mix of bank credit and government subsidy. Under the Pradhan Mantri Gramodaya Yozana (PMGY) launched in 2000, additional central assistance is given to states for basic services such as primary health, primary education, rural shelter, rural drinking water and rural electrification. |Another important scheme is Antyodaya Anna Yozana (AAY) about which you will be reading more in the next chapter. •The results of these programmes have been mixed. One of the major reasons for less effectiveness is the lack of proper implementation and right targeting. •Moreover, there has been a lot of overlapping of schemes. •Despite good intentions, the benefits of these schemes are not fully reached to the deserving poor.
Therefore, the major emphasis in recent years is on proper monitoring of all the poverty alleviation programmes. The Challenges Ahead
Poverty has certainly declined in India. But despite the progress, poverty reduction remains India's most compelling challenge.
Wide disparities in poverty are visible between rural and urban areas and among different states.
Certain social and economic groups are more vulnerable to poverty. Poverty reduction is expected to make better progress in the next ten to fifteen years. This would be possible mainly due to higher economic growth, increasing stress on universal free elementary education. declining population growth, increasing empowerment of the women and the economically

weaker sections of society. The official definition of poverty, however captures only a limited part of what poverty really means to people. •It is about a "minimum" subsistence level of living rather than a "reasonable" level of living. •Many scholars advocate that we must broaden the concept into human poverty.

A large number of people may have been able to feed themselves. ___________×××××___________

Class 9 Economic chapter 4 notes, Study notes of Economics

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