Another lost Copenhagen
The latest UN report on World Social Situation 2010 – Rethinking Poverty – brings out grim facts regarding poverty reduction in India and the world

By Jyotsna Singh
Copenhagen has become the talking point of climatic debate and discussions due to the recent Copenhagen Conference. But this is not the first meet of the world leaders which failed to impress the world. In 1995, the global leaders had met at the World Summit for Social Development to discuss pathetic poverty levels across the globe. It described poverty eradication as an ethical, political and economic imperative, and identified it as one of the three pillars of social development. Subsequently in the Millennium Development Goals a target of halving global extreme poverty by 2015 was set.

The United Nations brought out its report on the World Social Situation 2010 with the theme — Rethinking Poverty. It says that the world is not on the track to meet the Millennium Development Goals of bringing down extreme global poverty by half by 2015. The current financial crisis seems to have worsened the situation as governments across the world are grappling with problems of bailing out their respective economies.

The report suggests that if poverty is viewed keeping in mind the wider definition which includes deprivation, social exclusion and lack of participation, the situation today may be even more deplorable than a money income poverty line would suggest. About South Asia, the report states: "South Asia is the developing subregion with the largest number of poor people: 43 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion poor people live in South Asian countries. The absolute number of people living in extreme poverty increased from 548.3 million to 595.6 million between 1981 and 2005. Rates of population growth in these countries have remained high and have led to an enlargement of both the total population as well as the numbers living in extreme poverty. In recent years, economic growth has been relatively high in the three largest countries in the region, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, which recorded annual rates of growth of GDP per capita above 5 per cent in 2000-2006.6 As a result, the subregion saw the proportion of those living in extreme poverty decline in relative terms, from a high of 59 per cent in 1981 to 40 per cent in 2005. However, such growth has not been sufficiently inclusive and pro-poor to reduce the absolute number of persons living in poverty. Income inequalities have grown steadily in India since the early 1980s, in both urban and rural areas."

The report mentions that India will need higher rates of poverty reduction if than recorded since 1990 if it is to meet the 2015 target. It needs an annual poverty reduction rate of 4.7% (between 2005 and 2015) against 1.4 between 1990 and 2005 if it wants to meet the MDG target of 27%; so far it has touched only 41.6 per cent. Rural India has 43.8 per cent of the people in extreme poverty as against 36.2 per cent in urban areas.

The report places India below Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka in terms of extreme poverty. Pakistan is the only nation in the sector to have achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting poverty by half between 1990 and 2015. Forty per cent of the Indians live on less than $ 1.25 (around Rs 60) a day. With this India stands third in terms of the highest proportion of extremely poor people in South Asia, next only to Nepal and Bangladesh.

The only good news for India is that according to the report the global poverty levels have changed very little over the past two decades except in China and East Asia and, to some extent, in India.