India's Poor to Stay Poor

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise toeradicate poverty in India by 2022, or in the next five years, is a political slogan. 111 million Indians, or a bit more than 41 per cent of current poor population of India, would remain poor forever. People in tribal and forested or degraded forest regions are more likely to remain poor forever. 

 Going by research of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), an international association of researchers and academicians, poverty is becoming chronic and hereditary in India. Chronic poverty is defined as “people, households, and social groups who are poor for sustained and significant or extended periods of their lives and whose families and children may inherit this persistent condition. While chronic poverty is dynamic in that people do climb out of, or fall into poverty in significant numbers, exiting such poverty can prove difficult.”

A significant number of poor in India are not able to escape out of the poverty trap, and most of these chronic poor belong to socially disadvantaged sections like the scheduled castes and tribes. “Studies done on the state of poverty in the 1970s and 1980s pointed out that close to 50 per cent of poor remained poor despite efforts to eradicate poverty. And more than just economic growth leading to eradicate poverty, these sections of people remained poor for various social and ecological reasons,” says  Shashanka Bhide, director at Madras Institute of Development Studies. 

Going by the National Council of Applied Economic Research’s Human Development Survey, during 2005-2012, 41.3 per cent of India’s poor (both rural and urban) remained poor. Recently, the World Bank also reported that during 2005-2011, 40 per cent of the poor remained poor. India has 269 million poor and this is the estimate that government has accepted. So, the number of chronic poor, according this estimate, is 111 million. “Our study, in the form of more than 30 papers, shows that it would be very difficult for the chronic poor to escape the trap,” says Aasha Kapur Mehta, an economist with the Indian Institution of Public Administration. 

 A three-decade tracking of poor households in rural India by the CPRC claims that those who are chronically poor may pass on poverty to their next generation. What’s more, people residing in tribal and forested areas are likely to remain poor forever, fomenting violent conflicts in future.

"Persistent backwardness and inequality have led to concentration of poverty in certain parts of India. So there is a geographical dimension to poverty,” says the CPRC report.

The count of very poor (with a consumption expenditure of Rs 9 per day per person) is an indicator of chronic poverty. Though the number of very poor is decreasing, the percentage is quite substantial. Their number was 115 million in 2004-05—37 per cent of the total poor. Between 1983-94 and 2004-05, the percentage of very poor in the total population has declined in all states except Odisha. The percentage in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh is higher than the all-India figure. The share of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh in the total population of very poor people rose from 57.5 per cent in 1983 to 66.8 per cent in 1993-94 and to 70.6 per cent in 2004-05. “This is alarming because the next generation of these people will also be poor. Thus a vicious cycle is created,” says Mehta.