Poverty Eradication And The Five Year Plans
The raising of the standard of living of the masses is one of the objectives of planning in India. The Second Plan talked of creating a specific status and place for the small man. The Fourth Plan talked of improvement in the condition of the common man and the weaker sections, especially through the provision of ’employment and education.
It also emphasised the attainment of a ‘national minimum’ as an essential prerequisite to improve the conditions of the ‘lower-income groups’. It recognised that the small farmers and the landless labourers constitute the bulk of the agricultural workers ‘having no productive base and depending for its livelihood on wage employment.
Only with the Fifth Plan, poverty alleviation came to be accepted as one of the principal objectives of economic planning. The Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty) slogan raised during the Parliamentary elections of 1971, brought into sharp focus the problem of poverty. The Fifth Plan stated that at present over 220 million were estimated to be living below this level. Unemployment, under-employment and the low resource base of a multitude of producers, particularly in agriculture, were the principal causes of poverty. The elimination of poverty would not be attained as a corollary to a certain acceleration in the rate of growth of the economy alone.
In the Fifth Plan, it was necessary to launch a direct attack on the problems of unemployment, under-employment and massive low-end poverty. The Sixth Plan (1978-83) stated that according to a recent estimate using norms of calorie consumption, the percentage of population below the poverty line in 1977-78 may be projected at 48 per cent in the rural areas and 41 per cent in the urban areas. The total number of the poor, so defined, would be about 290 million. About 160 million of these fall below 75 per cent of the poverty line. The planners were of the view that poverty is a reflection of the problem of unemployment and under-employment. They, therefore, asserted that both rural and urban poverty are identifiable with low productivity, low wages, and intermittent employment, as well as chronic lack of work.
The Seventh Plan reviewing the impact of the poverty programmes mentions. There is now evidence. a to suggest that the process of economic growth and the anti-poverty programmes have made a or significant dent in the problem of poverty. 34 million people crossed the poverty line between 1977-78 and 1984-85. During the Seventh Plan, the planners hope that number of poor persons will fall from 273 million in 1984-85 to 211 million by 1989-90 and in percentage terms from 36.9 per cent to 25.8 per cent by 1989-90.
The tenth plan accepts that 26 per cent of the population i.e., 260 million persons were below the poverty line in 1999-2000. Out of these 75 per cent (195 million ) were in the rural areas and 25 per cent ( 65 million ) were in the urban areas. India accounts for 22 per cent of the world’s poor. With a programme of generating 50 million employment opportunities during the Tenth Plan accompanied by the overall growth of GDP by 8 per cent per annum, the Tenth Plan targets to reduce poverty by about 7 percentage points from 26.1 per cent in 1999-2000 to 19.3 per cent in 2006-07.
However, most of the poor would be concentrated in six states – Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Maharashtra. These six states would have 164 million poor ( i.e., 75% of the total poor ) in 2006-07. As against them, Haryana, Punjab, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Delhi are likely to register a negligible level of poverty (2 per cent) by 2006-07.
Need for Redefining Poverty Line
The debate about redefining poverty has two schools of thought. Among the first school of thought are those economists who are of the view that attempts at upgrading the poverty line from time to time have followed a wrong methodology which has resulted in developing a false notion that reduction of poverty is going at a fairly good pace and that by the year 2006-07, as targeted by the Tenth-Plan, India would be able to reduce poverty to a level of 19.34 per cent for the country as a whole and this implies the total number of poor at and of 2006-07 will be 220 million – about 170 million in the rural areas and 50 million in the urban areas.
The Tenth Plan Approach Paper mandated a reduction in the poverty rate by 5 percentage points during the Tenth Plan and another 10 percentage points during the Eleventh Plan. This will still leave more than 11 per cent of the population, or about 130 million people, below the poverty line in 2012. Professor Utsa Patnaik has contested the methodology adopted for deriving these estimates. The second school of thought includes a group of economists who argue for redefining the poverty line. “Mohan Guruswamy and R.S. Abraham have raised the question of relative poverty in India since India is expected to be a super-economic power by 2020. It would be desirable to understand the poverty scenario during the last 30 years or so.
Check out these notes on the Poverty Scenario in India.