 Hello everyone, my name is Deeksha Jain and I have secured the 22nd Rankin Civil Services Examination 2018. In this video, I will be talking about poverty. So first let us talk about what is poverty. It has been defined as a socio-economic condition in which a certain section of society is not able to meet the basic requirements in life. This is an older understanding of poverty and it is not a very inclusive understanding. How we define poverty today is that it does mean the inability of the section of the society, inability to meet the day-to-day needs and requirements of life. But in a broader sense, poverty is not just that, it is not just the lack of material resources or income, but it is also about the non-material conditions. It is about multiple deprivations with respect to economic deprivation, social deprivation, and ability to make certain choices, lack of freedoms in lives. And it is a condition when a person is not able to make choices with respect to important matters in his or her own life. It also has a psychological aspect. This idea of poverty was basically developed by Amartya Sain in his capabilities approach, where he said that poverty is not just about economic poverty, but it is much more than that. It is multi-dimensional and it causes deprivations. It would include things like lack of access to water, lack of access to electricity, lack of access to education. So it is not just about having less money or not being able to eat. It is much more than that and much more expansive than that. And taking from this, the United Nations Development Program has also developed the multi-dimensional poverty index as opposed to the earlier index which was not this multi-dimensional which focused in a much narrower form. So in India, we had various committees, Surya Sandoval committee which drew the poverty line and it said that I think 37% of India was under poverty line. Then the Rangarajan committee came in later and it also came up with its own evaluation of poverty and it said that 29.9% of people were below the poverty line in 2015. But a basic framework with which to just draw a homogenised and uniformed line has been absent. At the same time, the last one, the Rangarajan committee report is considered to be drawing from this. The United Nations Development Program has also come up with the multi-dimensional poverty index which is not just about economic poverty, but includes indicators of health, education, standard of living, assets, owned, etc. So the idea and conception of poverty has become very wide and much more broad over the years as more and more research has gone into it. In India, we had the poverty line by Surya Sandoval and according to 37% of people were under the poverty line. Then we had the Rangarajan committee which also came up with its own conception of poverty and so on and so forth. Poverty is a problem that India is facing to this day although we have combated it a lot ever since independence as well. So let us now delve into the causes of poverty. First is economic causes, backward agriculture. In India, agriculture is more labour intensive and less productive because of which the income of the Indian farmer is very less and many of the rural Indian farmers are under poverty. The slow process of industrialisation and urbanisation. Secondary industries, manufacturing especially has not caught up the primary and secondary industries in India. So that has also led to, that has not led to the same rise in wages which was for example experience in industrial revolution in European countries. There has also been increasing economic inequality and that has also furthered poverty. Lack of sufficient institutional support system in terms of credit facility, land reforms issues or financial inclusion and many the institutional support of health and education also. So this has also deepened poverty in India. Unemployment and indebtedness are also very high among the Indian poor and they have further put them into the trap of poverty. Second would be social causes. Within social causes, caste system is also an important factor. Many of the poor in India are also belong to the lower caste because both factors enforce each other. Moving on to social causes, caste system is one major factor that has affected. The caste system deprives people of land, education, discourages labour mobility and furthers poverty of those belonging to the lower caste. Apart from that, prevalence of corruption, poor level of education and skill development and even superstitions have contributed as social factors to poverty. There are also individual factors like high alcoholism, gambling, poor status of health and education, poor sense of motivation of achievement. So all these individual factors, depression among farmers etc also further poverty in India. There are also many consequences. I would say many evil consequences of poverty which basically functions as a cycle which creates other harmful cycles. Poverty leads to high population growth, poor quality of human resource, bonded labour, child labour, naxalism, mal governance. It is a threat to ecology. It increases law and order problems because of increasing frustration among the population. It leads to increasing crime and delinquent behaviour and poverty furthers poverty. The culture of poverty is the vicious cycle of poverty as we say. Once poverty leads to so many of these bad things and they further poverty. So it is very difficult to break out of this vicious cycle. So now we will be talking about certain measures that can be taken or are being taken to combat poverty in India. The short term measures like food security through the PDS system, wage employment as is being done under the NREGA scheme, universal basic income can also be tried to specially for the ones who are deeply marginalised and facing imminent danger because of poverty. Another suggestion is that the minimum wages act should be applied to the unorganised sector, informal sector as well because so many types of employment are excluded out of the wages act, many people don't even get the minimum wage and there is no law to enforce that they can get minimum wages. So this is also something that needs to be done and the economic survey also talks about this. Medium term objectives are promotion of self-employment, control of corruption, very important is capability building through education and skills development. If you give a person money that person can eat once but if you skill that person and if you provide education to a person it is a way of ensuring that the person can earn his or her own livelihood and can basically widen the choices that he or she has. So this is one of the most important factors which helps in curbing poverty. Long term measures to curb poverty would be ending psychological deprivation, population control is very important, industrialisation and urbanisation have to be promoted in a planned manner so that without harming the people they are able to improve the wages of people, basically improve wages of people, improve their income, provide education to them. There needs to be specialised focus on backward areas which are specifically suffering. The aspirational districts programme is very relevant here because it focuses on 200 most backward districts in India and they are located in any states. So these districts are given focused attention so that they can combat poverty in a very focused manner. Then there also needs to be proper work on controlling natural calamities and there needs to be effective disaster management. Whenever a disaster strikes a flood comes, a drought hits or a cyclone comes, the most affected are the absolutely marginalised in the poor, they do not have proper houses, their houses are washed away, they hardly have any belongings and hunger and salvation. So these are the people who suffer the most in disasters so there needs to be proper disaster management and rehabilitation for them as well. Some important schemes for poverty eradication in India are Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee at NULM that is National Rural Livelihood Mission, National Urban Livelihood Mission. What we really need is to move from a vicious circle of poverty to a virtuous circle whereby positive enforcement of education, health, even economic assistance, we are able to get people out of that vicious circle and as a country we can move forward on the path of development. So that will be all for poverty. Thank you.