Poverty Strategy in India

In the half century since its independence, India has accomplished many notable social and economic achievements. Among these are the eradication of widespread famine, a reduction in population growth, some lowering of caste barriers to economic opportunity and the creation of a large pool of technical and scientific talent. While it has also managed to reduce poverty in that period, only since 1975, when growth accelerated, has the decline been fairly steady. The pace, moreover, remains both slow and uneven — faster in the southern states than the northern ones, and more likely to empower men than women. Government efforts to reduce poverty through direct anti-interventions have yielded mixed results. Many of those programs, in fact, have missed their supposed target — the poor — and delivered their benefits to the economically more advantaged. As India moves ahead with the economic liberalization that has yielded a higher platform for growth and therefore the potential for a higher level of welfare, it has an opportunity to reexamine its approach to reduce poverty.

The centrality of growth-The last five years have shown the rates of growth that India could achieve with market oriented development policies and a better integration into the world economy. This is a promising development because the last few decades have shown the extent to which the poor stand to gain from an acceleration in growth. The latter widens opportunity, provides the resources needed to invest in human development, and creates the very foundation that will increase returns to human capital — and thus families' willingness to send their children, including girls, to school, have fewer of them, or in multiple other ways, invest in their future.

Priority for human capital-Neighboring countries in Asia that have made a point of combining pro-growth development policies with investments in the health and education of their people have seen economic growth and poverty reduction follow. India, however, has not accorded sufficiently high priority to the education of the poor and 33 million of its 105 million 6-to-10-years-old are not in school. These youngsters are not offered the opportunity to develop the skills needed for upward mobility. Along with the neglect of primary education goes that of gender discrimination, which condemns a much greater proportion of girls and women to illiteracy and to ill-health. Reducing the gender inequality among the poor requires a determined effort to focus on improved health care for women, maternal health care in particular, combined with basic education. India's health system needs to put a new emphasis on basic care. Doing so will improve not only the life span and well-being of poor women and their ability to determine what family size they want, but it will also contribute to the economic health of their families, and consequently of India's society. And since poverty is not the only source of India's gender disparities, a determined government effort to eradicate such disparities is urgently needed.