No Poverty

India and The Sustainable Development Goals

Think about it

• One in ten people lived on less than US$1.90 per day in 2015

• Some 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty.

• 29,000 children die every day from avoidable causes and One out of five children lives in extreme poverty.

• The majority of people living on less than $1.90 a day live in sub-Saharan Africa.

• Worldwide, the poverty rate in rural areas is 17.2 percent—more than three times higher than in urban areas.

• 8 percent of employed workers and their families worldwide lived in extreme poverty in 2018.

Sentences like these would compel you to leave everything and devise a plan to eradicate poverty within an impossible deadline. That is exactly what the UN did. Goal 1 talks about ensuring social protection for all children and other vulnerable groups which is critical to reducing poverty.

Following were the Targets to be achieved till 2030

• eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere ( currently measured as people living on less than USD 1.25 a day)

• Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all

• Ensure that the poor and vulnerable in particular, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology, and financial services, including microfinance.

• Ensure significant mobilization of resources from a variety of sources, to implement programs and policies to end poverty in all its dimensions.

• Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional, and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies

The list goes on but with absolutely no element of surprise, we’ll let you know that the latest projections from the World Bank indicate that if we continue on the normal path, the world will not be able to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.

The Current Status-

• As of May 2021, 84 million people are living in extreme poverty, accounting for 6% of the entire population.

• According to United Nations Development Programme administrator Achim Steiner, India lifted 271 million people out of extreme poverty in a 10-year time period from 2005/06 to 2015/16

• and the incidence of multidimensional poverty has significantly reduced from 54.7 percent in 2005 to 27.9 percent in 2015-16.

Our Poverty Alleviation Policies

• According to the MGNREGA official webpage, 5.47 crore families applied for MGNREGA employment, which is the biggest number. The number of gram panchayats that do not report any MGNREGA spending has also decreased. This demonstrates that an increasing number of panchayats are utilizing MGNREGA to provide unskilled employment to the unemployed

• National Social Assistance Program (NSAP) is implemented in 36 states and territories Affecting a total of 33511510 people the scheme provides financial assistance to the elderly, widows and persons with disabilities in the form of social pensions.

The Pandemic

Evidently, the economic slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t been kind to the whole of India let alone the poorer sections of the society.

India’s middle class may have shrunk by a third due to 2020’s pandemic-driven recession, while the number of poor people — earning less than ₹150 per day — more than doubled, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

In comparison, Chinese incomes remained relatively unshaken, with just a 2% drop in the middle-class population, it found.

The number of people in India with incomes of $2 or less a day is estimated to have increased by 7.5 crores because of the pandemic. This increase accounts for nearly 60% of the global increase in poverty, estimating an increase from almost 6 crores to 13.4 crore poor people.

Conclusion

The pre-pandemic times had a promising future for the poor of the country. COVID19 pulled India years back in terms of the development it made in its goal of SDGs. However, it is a global scenario and we might expect the same for other countries as well but attaining the goal of ‘No Poverty’ by the year 2030 is hardly imaginable. Only a post-pandemic time combined with greater economic efforts and government policies might help India boost its speed in this race.