Towards a better India/Major Problems/Poverty

Poverty is a significant problem in India considering the fact that India is the home of nearly 400 million poor people. Poverty is a root cause for many other problems including population explosion, child labor and crime proliferation. For India to prosper, the most important goal is to achieve poverty alleviation for millions of its citizens and poverty reduction would have a significant impact on reaching the other objectives for a modern state. However, poverty removal would require the partial solution to the other major problems, including illiteracy and gender bias.

Factors Responsible for Poverty

Incidence of poverty is strongly dependent of various social, economic and natural factors. Being a nation of 1 billion people compacted in a region one-third the size of United States and heavy concentration of population in lands far from the access to sea, complicates the problem. The nation has a large variety of tribals, who do not have access to any of the gifts of modern world but suffer the negative aspects of modernization, including pollution and global warming.

Natural Factors

The natural factors responsible for poverty include:

1. Heavy concentration of population over a large area (the country houses more people than Europe, Africa, North America & South America).
2. Predominant dependence on seasonal rainfall for agriculture (agriculture employs nearly 70% of the people and majority of the cultivation depend solely upon rain and the rainfall pattern can vary significantly from year-to-year).
3. Majority of dense populated regions (Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab) are far from the access to the sea (oceans and seas are very critical to the economic development of nations).

Social Factors

The social factors include:

1. Around 430 million people are illiterate (majority of them are poor) and illiteracy forces people to stick to ancestral jobs and prevents people from having job flexibility
2. Caste System prohibited access to lucrative jobs to a vast majority of the people. Though, such institutions have been dismantled in the last 50 years, its presence can still be seen in rural areas.

References

• Causes of Poverty
• Poverty Net
• Development Gateway
• Earth Institute

India

• Data on Indian poverty
• India Child link