Poverty and Enemployment

The three dimensional attack on poverty adopted by the government has not succeeded in poverty alleviation in India Comment.

Answer:

·         Poverty alleviation has always been accepted as one of the major objectives of planned development process in India but even after vast spending on poverty alleviation programmes, the government has not succeeded in poverty alleviation in India. Despite various strategies to alleviate poverty, problems like hunger, malnourishment, illiteracy and tack of basic amenities are prevalent in India. None of the poverty alleviation strategies resulted in any radical change in the ownership of assets, process of production and improvement of basic amenities to the needy.

Due to unequal distribution of assets, the benefits from poverty alleviation programmes have not actually reached the poor. The amount of resources allocated for the poverty alleviation programmes is not sufficient when we take the magnitude of poverty into consideration. The implementation of the poverty alleviation programmes is the responsibility of government and bank officials who are ill motivated, inadequately trained, corruption prone and vulnerable to pressure from local elites. The resources are thus used inefficiently. Government policies have also failed to address the various issues related to poverty due to non-participation of local level institutions in programme implementation. It is evident that high growth alone is not sufficient to reduce poverty without the active participation of the people. Further, it is necessary to identify poverty stricken areas and provide infrastructure such as schools, roads, power, telecom, IT services, training institutions etc. Institutional weaknesses abound and implementation failure is the biggest reasons that these programmes not succeeded. There exists a deep nexus between unemployment and poverty. Unemployment or under employment and the casual and intermittent nature of work in both rural and urban areas drives unemployed people who do not have resources to make their ends meet into indebtedness and poverty. If employment opportunities are generated, then more people will be employed leading to rise in their income which in turn will reduce poverty. Due to unemployment, income of the people is reduced to a large extent and they are unable to get access to education, health facilities, proper sanitation, etc. This causes poor quality of living and hence poor human capital and skills which in turn lead to poverty making a vicious circle of poverty.