Poverty And Social Exclusion

Rhea Sanchiela Jayakumar

20141138

B.A.LLB 2014- Section E

Poverty, Social Exclusion and Welfare

Poverty is not an alien concept for a humongous and densely populated country like India. Poverty has remained apart our history and dates back to the early nineteenth century. It has since been a hindrance to our development. Poverty in conventional terms is defined as the condition of lacking basic necessities such as money, food, shelter etc. Earlier it was constrained to an economic sense but nowadays poverty extends to the incidence of lacking certain facilities when compared to those owned by others in the same community. Along with poverty comes social exclusion. Social exclusion is as stated by The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee,

Determining the cause of poverty is the first step in finding a solution. It has been noticed that the absence of relevant data when conducting such surveys is one of the main causes of the failure of government schemes to help the poor. The current statistics as assessed by the National Sample Survey Office states that twenty-two percent of India’s population lives in poverty. Of those who reside in urban areas, fourteen percent are under the poverty line. Similarly, twenty-six percent of those who hail from rural areas are poor. Since 2005, India has been following the Tendulkar methodology to calculate poverty in the country. This method considers the consumption or spending per individual over a certain period for a basket of essential goods rather than the earlier method of considering income standards. On the analysis of the urban poor, it was found that the life expectancy and maternal mortality are lower when compared to that of the middle and upper class due to low quality housing, unhealthy living conditions and limited access to health care services. Other causes might include disabilities or the hereditary nature of

The above mentioned schemes namely help the rural poor by providing employment, housing, health care and pension to the old, banking facilities, provision of a sum of money on death of the head of the family etc. But all these schemes are aimed at the rural poor, why not the urban poor? As a matter of fact, the urban poor face relatively more difficulties when compared to that of the rural poor. They are subject to a more extreme case of social exclusion especially when living among the urban population; the poor are bound to face social exclusion. They have to compete with other persons of a completely different league for almost everything: right from housing to grabbing a job opportunity. The rich are favoured in employment due to them possessing better business contacts, better image etc. The lower class and urban poor are sandwiched between the upper class and the rural poor, leaving them to get almost nothing. Being stuck in the middle; they have to do everything in the limited power to get by. The government spends an incredibly impressive amount of funds on such schemes. They do it with the whole purpose of uplifting the poor and making their lives easier but they are