India is 'budding superpower', this century belongs to India, 'India Shining', 'Incredible India', 'India poised' are no longer advertising slogans, but part of the mainstream beliefs of a section of the world. The BPO capital of the world, is no longer a country that lives from ship to mouth forced to feed its population the rejects of other countries cattle feed, laced with weeds... or is it?
Certainly some have benefited from the market led polity, while some others have lost. Our bureaucrats have done what they do best: invent new spins to put a glossy façade on the dismal reality facing up to 80% of the country. Their intelligence is used more to disingenuously to at best gloss over failures or at its more frequent worst blame the victim, and shoot the messenger.
In this series of posts, we will have a look at the figures that tell us who has benefited, who hasn't and the long distance to travel.
We will see the 'three India's'
All the figures given here are the government's own.
Unless otherwise mentioned, the figures are for 2007.
Source: Arjun Sengupta Chairman, National Commission for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector report on the Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihood in the Unorganised Sector. based on government data 1993-94 and 2004-05.
Source: Arjun Sengupta Chairman, National Commission for Enterprises in Unorganised Sector report on the Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihood in the Unorganised Sector. based on government data 1993-94 and 2004-05.
Source: The World Bank estimates for India based on household surveys carried out in 1999-2000.
The billionaires
We have more millionaires than many 'rich' countries!
Source: Forbes, 2007.
and in 2008
At number 4, the ranking remains the same for India
Though there are a few surprises in the details!
... a rather rapid rise.
Source: Forbes, 2008.
Deprived/Destitute: They earn less than 90,000 Indian rupees a year ($1,969 per household, or about a dollar per person per day) estimated to be 210 million (23.3%)
Aspirers: households earning between 90,000 and 200,000 rupees ($1,969-$4,376) per year. 275 million people (30.5 %)
Seekers: earning between 200,000 and 500,000 rupees ($4,376- $10,941) 275 million people (30.5 %)
Strivers: with incomes of between 500,000 and 1 million rupees ($10,941-$21,882) 150 million people (16.66%,)
(below the poverty line in the United States, but at ppp the income of the seekers and strivers is $23,000 to $118,000)
Global Indians, earning more than 1 million rupees ($21,882, or $118,000, taking into account the cost of living) about 6 million (0.066 %).
SourceThe Indian National Council of Applied Economic Research
The Maharashtra government carried out a door-to-door survey of farmer households in the six districts of Vidarbha ( Amravati, Akola, Yavatmal, Washim, Buldhana and Wardha) that have seen the highest number of farmer suicides. Seventeen lakh households were covered, in 8,351 villages.
Major sources of the distress
The state government’s website puts the number of farm suicides at 2,400 in these six districts, between 2001 and 2006. It shows that this year has been by far the worst. By November, the number had reached 1,215.
The report admits that in spite of the prime minister’s and chief minister’s relief packages, the number of suicides in the six districts “continues to be in the range of 100 per month”.
Source: Government of Maharashtra, 2007
Only one in five rural households has a toilet (rural development ministry)
The other causes are
Other findings of the report are:
States with high rates of underweight children are
Other findings of the report include:
National Family Health Survey (NHFS-3) showed that there has not been much improvement in the nutritional status of children, within the last eight years.
SourceState of the World’s Children 2006
Source‘Elementary Education in India 2005-06’, prepared by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), covered 11,24,033 schools in 35 states and union territories.
Source: the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-III) 2005-06
Source: The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-III) 2005-06
South Asia will fall short on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), says the World Bank-IMF Global Monitoring Report. Though much of the world, including South Asia, is set to cut extreme poverty in half by the due date of 2015, prospects are gravest for the goals of reducing child and maternal mortality, with serious shortfalls also likely in primary school completion, nutrition, and sanitation goals.
The report stresses the link between environment and development and calls for urgent action on climate change. Arguably, few regions in the world are more at risk from climate change in terms of adverse impact on the poor than South Asia and the region faces a large potential health risk from climate change through increased malnutrition, diarrhea, and malaria.
Key findings:
- South Asia is expected to contribute the most to global poverty reduction in the next decade
- South Asia is likely to fall seriously short in some areas, including primary education, gender parity in tertiary education, and child mortality goals
- South Asia has the world’s highest incid ence of child malnutrition and the child malnutrition rate in India is double the African average.
# # #
Permanent URL: http://go.worldbank.org/HOZ4DZBEH0
Documentation.
World Bank Finds More People Live in Steep Poverty
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The World Bank said Tuesday that more people were living in extreme poverty in developing countries than previously thought as it adjusted the recognized yardstick for measuring global poverty to $1.25 a day from $1.
The bank said there were 1.4 billion people — a quarter of the developing world — living in extreme poverty on less than $1.25 a day in 2005 in the world's developing countries. Last year, the bank said there were 1 billion people living under $1 a day.
The 2005 figures, the latest available, are likely to put fresh pressure on big donor countries to move more aggressively to combat global poverty.
Even so, the new estimates, based on updated global price data, show how progress has been made in helping the poor over the past 25 years. In 1981, 1.9 billion people were living below the $1.25 a day poverty line. The data are based on 675 household surveys in 116 countries.
"These new estimates are a major advance in poverty measurements because they are based on far better price data for assuring that the poverty lines are comparable across countries," said Martin Ravallion, director of the World Bank's Development Research Group.
While the developing world has more poor people than previously believed, the World Bank's new chief economist, Justin Lin, said the world was still on target to meet a United Nations goal of halving the number of people in poverty by 2015.
However, excluding China from overall calculations, the world fails to meet the United Nations poverty targets, Mr. Lin said.
The World Bank data show that the portion of people living below the $1.25 a day poverty line fell over nearly 25 years to 26 percent in 2005 from 52 percent in 1981, a decline on average of about one percentage point a year, he said.
Mr. Lin said the new data meant that rich donor nations needed to keep their promises of stepped-up aid to poor countries. "The sobering news that poverty is more pervasive than we thought means we must redouble our efforts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa," Mr. Lin said.
The new figures come ahead of an updated assessment of progress in meeting the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which will be released next month at a meeting of the General Assembly.
While most of the developing world has managed to reduce poverty, the rate in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region, has not changed in nearly 25 years, according to data using the new $1.25 a day poverty line. Half of the people in sub-Saharan Africa were living below the poverty line in 2005, the same as in 1981. That means about 380 million people lived under the poverty line in 2005, compared with 200 million in 1981.
Elsewhere, poverty has declined. In East Asia, which includes China, the poverty rate fell to 18 percent in 2005 from almost 80 percent in 1981, when it was the poorest region. In China, the number of people in poverty fell to 207 million in 2005 from 835 million in 1981.
In India, the number of people below the $1.25 a day poverty line increased to 455 million in 2005 from 420 million people in 1981. But the share of the population in poverty fell to 42 percent from 60 percent.
World Bank: Two and a half billion people live on less than $2 a day
By David Walsh
2 September 2008
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The World Bank reported Tuesday that in 2005 an estimated 1.4 billion
people in the so-called ‘developing world,’ one-fourth of its
population, lived on less than $1.25 a day, the new official poverty
line. This figure is 400 million more than the Bank’s 2004 estimate of
985 million. Another 1.2 billion people live on between $1.25 and $2 a day.
The report issues from an institution correctly identified by great
numbers of people around the world as a reactionary pillar of the global
financial system. Despite efforts by Bank officials to put the best face
on things, that more than two and a half billion people continue to live
in unspeakable poverty in the first decade of the 21st century is an
indictment of the capitalist system.
Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen, of the World Bank’s Development
Research Group, in a study entitled, “The Developing World is Poorer
than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty,”
note that in 2004, for the first time, the Bank’s global poverty count
had fallen below one billion.
They continue: “Alas the revised estimates reported in the present paper
suggest that our celebrations in finally getting under the one billion
mark for the ‘$1 a day’ poverty count were premature. ... We find that
the incidence of poverty in the world is higher than past estimates have
suggested.”
The 2005 estimates are based on surveys conducted in 116 countries and
interviews with some 1.23 million households.
The most dire conditions exist in Sub-Saharan Africa. After a
quarter-century (1981-2005) that witnessed the most extraordinary
advances in technology, the percentage of people living in absolute
poverty in that region remained unchanged; some 50 percent of its
population subsists on $1.25 a day or less.
The actual number of the extremely poor in Sub-Saharan Africa almost
doubled, from 200 million in 1981 to about 380 million in 2005. “If the
trend continues,” notes a World Bank press release, “a third of the
world’s poor will live in Africa by 2015. Average consumption among poor
people in Sub-Saharan Africa stood at a meager 70 cents a day in 2005.”
Most of the 15 poorest countries in the world—Malawi, Mali, Ethiopia,
Sierra Leone, Niger, Uganda, Gambia, Rwanda, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania,
Tajikistan, Mozambique, Chad, Nepal and Ghana—are located in Africa.
In South Asia, the percentage of those living below the $1.25 poverty
rate has decreased from 60 to 40 percent over 1981-2005, but the
absolute number of desperately poor people did not decline; there are
some 600 million in that category. In India, extremely uneven economic
development reduced the poverty rate as a share of the total population
from 60 percent in 1981 to 42 percent in 2005, but the number of the
destitute increased from 420 million in 1981 to 455 million in 2005.
The largest factor in lowering the percentage of extremely poor people
in East Asia has been the explosive industrialization of China. In 1981
East Asia was the poorest region in the world. In China the number of
people surviving on less than $1.25 a day in 2005 prices dropped from
835 million in 1981 to 207 million in 2005. A quarter of a century ago,
the report states, “China’s incidence of poverty (measured by the
percentage below $1.25 per day) was roughly twice that for the rest of
the developing world; by the mid-1990s, the Chinese poverty rate had
fallen well below average.”
In the former colonial world, outside of China, the progress has been
far more limited; the total number of extremely poor people has remained
at about 1.2 billion. The percentage of the ‘developing world’
population living in absolute poverty has decreased from 40 percent in
1981 to 29 percent in 2005, according to the Bank. Excluding China,
however, the most oppressed countries are not on track to reach the
Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the 1990 poverty rate by 2015.
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA), the former Stalinist-ruled
countries, the picture is bleak. “The mean consumption of EECA’s poor
has actually fallen since the 1990s, even though the overall poverty
rate was falling.” In passing, the authors note that social inequality
has grown in that region since the collapse of Stalinism: “The paucity
of survey data for EECA in the 1980s should also be recalled. Thus our
estimates are heavily based on extrapolations, which do not allow for
any changes in distribution. One would expect that distribution was
better from the point of view of the poor in EECA in the 1980s, in which
case poverty would have been even lower than we estimate—and the
increase over time even larger.”
The poverty rate in Latin America and the Caribbean has also declined,
but not enough to bring down the number of extremely poor people.
Ravallion and Chen point to two phenomena that tend to undercut even the
limited progress they cite.
First, although hundreds of millions of people have lifted themselves
out of absolute poverty since 1981, the improvement has been very slight
for vast numbers. While the increase in wealth at the other pole of
global society, registered in the number of billionaires and the share
of national incomes held by the top one or five percent of the
population, has been explosive, the very poor have only inched ahead and
remain immensely vulnerable.
The study’s authors point to the phenomenon of “bunching up” that has
occurred between $1.25 and $2.00 a day. They observe that the number of
people living at that level “has actually risen sharply over these 25
years, from about 600 million to 1.2 billion. This marked ‘bunching up’
of people just above the $1.25 line suggests that the poverty rate
according to that line could rise sharply with aggregate economic
contraction.”
Speaking of the same phenomenon in relation to both East and South Asia,
they note that a total of some 900 million people live on between $1.25
and $2.00 a day, “roughly equally split between the two sides of Asia.
While this points again to the vulnerability of the poor, by the same
token it also suggests that substantial further impacts on poverty can
be expected from economic growth, provided that it does not come with
substantially higher inequality.”
In a press release, the World Bank notes that its estimates “suggest
less progress in getting over the $2 per day hurdle. Indeed, we have
seen no change in the number of people living below $2 per day at around
2.5 billion, between 1981 and 2005.”
In another press release, the Bank is also careful to point out that the
new estimates “do not yet reflect the potentially large adverse effects
on poor people of rising food and fuel prices since 2005.”
Or, as Ravallion and Chen write in their conclusion, “There are a great
many people who have reached the frugal $1.25 standard, but are still
very poor, and clearly vulnerable to downside shocks. One such shock is
the steep rise in international food and fuel prices since 2005. Despite
the progress in reducing the lags in survey data availability, it will
probably not be until 2010 that we can make a reasonably confident
assessment of the ex post impacts of the rising food and fuel prices on
the world’s poor. Until then, ex ante assessments will be required,
based on pre-crisis data and economic assumptions. Such assessments
suggest that at least a few years of the progress reported here have
been eroded since 2005.”
NEW DELHI: India is home to roughly one-third of all poor people in the world. It also has a higher proportion of its population living on less than $2 per day than even sub-Saharan Africa.
That is the sobering news coming out of the World Bank's latest estimates on global poverty. The fine print of the estimates also shows that the rate of decline of poverty in India was faster between 1981 and 1990 than between 1990 and 2005. This is likely to give fresh ammunition to those who maintain that economic reforms, which started in 1991, have failed to reduce poverty at a faster rate.
India, according to the new estimates, had 456 million people or about 42% of the population living below the new international poverty line of $1.25 per day. The number of Indian poor also constitute 33% of the global poor, which is pegged at 1.4 billion people.
India also had 828 million people, or 75.6% of the population living below $2 a day. Sub-Saharan Africa, considered the world's poorest region, is better — it has 72.2% of its population (551m) people below the $2 a day level.
The estimates are based on recently recalculated purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates, which makes comparisons across countries possible. The dollar exchange rates being referred to here, therefore, are not the ones used in normal exchange rates.
While the full report has not yet been released, a briefing note sent by the Bank had some of the data and showed that the poverty rate — those below $1.25 per day — for India had come down from 59.8% in 1981 to 51.3% by 1990 or 8.5 percentage points over nine years. Between 1990 and 2005, it declined to 41.6%, a drop of 9.7 percentage points over 15 years, clearly a much slower rate of decline.
An FAQ on the new estimates, also provided by the Bank, however states, "India has maintained even progress against poverty since the 1980s, with the poverty rate declining at a little under one percentage point per year."
The new international poverty line of $1.25 PPP per day has been arrived at as "the average poverty line found in the poorest 10-20 countries", according to the briefing note. In other words, more than four out of 10 Indians lives below what the world's poorest countries consider the poverty line.
The new estimates are sobering not just for India but for the developing world as a whole, as they reveal higher levels of poverty than earlier estimated.
East Asia, in fact, is the region that has recorded the sharpest reductions in poverty from about 79% of the population in 1981 to 18% in 2005. In contrast, Eastern Europe and Central Asia has seen poverty rates go up from 1.6% to 5%. What is noticeable in this region is the decline in poverty till 1987, when it was down to just 1% of the population, and the sharp rise subsequently.
The Bank also makes the point that while raising people above the poverty line is a relatively achievable task — it believes poverty levels in 1990 can be halved by 2015 — it is proving very difficult to raise them above the $2 per day mark. The number of those in the developing world below this level has in fact gone up marginally from 2.5 billion to 2.6 billion since 1981.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3409374,flstry-1.cms