Poverty Alleviation The Basics

By Ganesh Prasad Pandeya

THOUGH an objective definition of poverty is surprisingly hard to formulate, it can be said that it is largely related to starvation, severe malnutrition, illiteracy, substandard clothing and housing. It is not just matter of absolute income; it is something about relative income. The National Planning Commission has defined poverty in terms of basic needs-food, clothing, fuelwoods, drinking water, primary health service and sanitation, basic education and skills, and minimum rural transportation. In the social context, the poor are those who are living below the minimum acceptable standard in comparison to the particular time and place. So, we can define two types of poverty that exist in the society-absolute poverty and relative poverty.

Variables

Poverty is not only related to economic phenomenon but also human dignity largely related to social, psychological and political activities. It extremely depends on type of ownership, control or access to resources, income distribution measures, levels of socio-economic development and so on. The socio-economic variables such as caste, location, occupation, sector of employment, education level, composition of family size also determine the level of poverty.

In Nepal, the problem of poverty has tood as a serious challenge to our development efforts. The National Planning Commission in the Ninth Plan document cited that 42 per cent of the total population has remained below the poverty line. Among them, 24.9 per cent are poor and 17.1 per cent is estimated to be ultra poor. Geographically, 41.0 per cent in hills, 24.9 per cent in terai and 56 per cent of the people in mountainous region live below the poverty line. Furthermore, the rate of poverty is rural areas in about double that of urban areas.

Thus, the incidence of poverty can be pronounced basically as rural phenomenon as 88 per cent people live in this area. Among the poor, very poor depend on agriculture for their food and their productivity is lower because they own land of poorer quality, seldom irrigated, and have limited access to modern technological advances. The rate of poverty remains higher because of a very wider gender gap, lower literacy rate, very limited access to infrastructure facility, higher unemployment and under employment rate, limited access to productive resources, relatively deprived from health treatement facility and public safety nets.

The inequalities in income, wealth and persistent to increase in poverty among the lower classes are widely perceived and frequently discussed still no effective measures have been applied that would ultimately benefit all strata of the soicety. This situation occurred because development specialists ignored the problem of inequality. Thus, assuming that when per capita GNP rises everyone becomes better off or in due course the benefits of economic development would trickle down to the poor. This classical economic approach-supply creates its own demand, undermined the role of civil soicety and their participation in development activities.

The latent cause behind this situation is that the government is still controlled by particular soical classes and acts in the best interests of those classes. Poverty alleviation efforts ahve not been broad, effective and focused on the poor. Furthermore, it lacks active participation in the interest to the poor. In the absence of identifying the real poor, the programme targeted to the poor could not reach areas with high poverty ratio. Because of the lack of administrative inertia, but most, if not all, porgrammes have failed to bring about suggested improvement of the socio-economic condition of the poor. On the one hand, there is a lack of coordination and cooperation among the government, non-government and private agencies; on the other hand, there is duplication in programmes as well as practice of decision making without an active participation and involvement of the poor.

In short, the political economy is against the improvement of the poor; rural and marginal groups. Political and bureaucratic elite became the mastery of the fate to the masses and centered on their own benefits. The practices of ad-hoc policies and programmes, ineffective implementation practices and apparent deficiencies in project management limited the scarce means and resources of the government, and scattered them in unproductive manner. Political parties mostly enjoyed talking well, but delivering little to the people.

As a result, income inequality remained with a worsening income distribution among the households. Many people have been deprived receiving no benefit at all from development. Finally and controversially, the poor are actually becoming worse off.

The income and consumption level and overall standard of the people have further declined. Having deep-rooted and highly entrenched poverty in the society, all development efforts were in vain.

Considering the mosaic of socio-economic realities, no single approach to poverty alleviation can be effective. Importance must be given to boost up local initiatives or local people should be enable to join in shaping the community-initiatives to overcome poverty. It can be hoped that only a sound, consistent and tactful efforts at combating and reducing poverty can bring progress in the coming days. It is also equally essential to create opportunities for the poor and enable them to participate in the decision making, policy and programme formulation and implementation of development programmes. Participation of the poor is a must as poverty can not be alleviated from external efforts or programmes imposed from above.

In the opinion of some experts, rural development target must be centered on agricultural development, which has the highest potential for growth and poverty alleviation. So priority should be given in agricultrual development as large segments of the poor have agriculture occupation as their livelihood.

Similarly, delivery mechanism must reach the doors of the poor. The poor must be mobilised in priority setting and decision making of public investment. Past experience shows that the programmes which have a direct control over resources and the services of the public such as ‘community forestry’, ‘farmer managed small-scale irrigation’, Food-For-Work’ have been successfully completed more efficiently by the public sector than the government sector.

Focus

The government should, systematically, focus on minimising distortions that puts the poor at a disadvantage. Public expenditure should be directed towards physical infrastructure or basic social services to the poor. Programme to provide safety nets to specific group of the poor must be adopted institutions in an effective way. Fundamentally, the government strategy must create an apportunity for the poor.

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