Nearly half of Asia’s 1.27 billion children live in poverty - deprived of food, safe drinking water, health or shelter. While 600 million children under the age of 18 lack access to one of these basic human needs, more than 350 million are deprived of two or more of these needs. These statistics are based on the ‘Growing up in Asia’ report from the child humanitarian organization Plan.
What should worry policy makers in the region is that nearly half of Asia’s families are not benefiting from economic growth and globalization. The report blamed the pressure of rapid population growth; on scarce resources; lack of access to education, health care, clean water and sanitation; caste discrimination; and weak governance and corruption.
Michael Diamond, Plan’s Asia Regional Director warns that this scale of child poverty will have a serious impact on Asia’s future prospects, unless it is addressed now.
Not surprisingly the report card on India has a list of statistics one is now used to. India it is reported has the largest number of poor children of any nation, with an estimated 80 percent of its 400 million children severely deprived and 60 percent absolutely poor. Almost half of all children under 5 are malnourished and a third of newborns are significantly underweight. Cataloguing the miseries, the report points that India also has the largest number of working children in the world and accounts for 20 percent of the world’s out of school children. The reports observation on the Girl Child in India is also not very encouraging. The girl’s life chances, in particular, are often seen to be severely limited.
Despite the growing economic clout of India as a major Asian powerhouse and the success stories on economic reforms and globalization it is indeed a sad irony that endemic poverty continue to pervade the country’s rural landscape. What can explain this phenomenon where a section of the society is unable to fulfill even its basic necessities of life? In India, poverty is drawn in terms of calorie intake and although, there had been in recent times a feel good factor that poverty levels were coming down, the recent figures would suggest otherwise. One of the anomalies in measuring poverty levels is that planners usually assume that increase of national income would lead to rise in living standards of the poor. However this has not been the case.
Poverty in India is rather endemic and does not make for easy solutions. This is because the underlying causes are intrinsically linked to one another; such as population increase, unequal distribution of assets, unemployment and low productivity of agriculture, just to mention a few. This calls for a multi-pronged attack on poverty. One of the measures is to ensure effective implementation of ant-poverty schemes. There is a plethora of such programs but all without much direction and focus leading to the failure of addressing the real issues. Poverty alleviation programs in the country must be reorganized. Once this is done, the schemes that must be encouraged include the creation of community assets, targeting individuals directly and improving the public distribution system so that those below the poverty line are able to get access to food grains at the subsidized rate.
One of the paradoxes of the reform era is that even though economic liberalization has led to a broad upswing in growth rates, there has been no significant dent made in the country’s poverty profile. So why did higher growth not benefit the poor? Some of the possible explanations are high inflation, the change in pattern of agricultural growth that did not favor farmers and failures of poverty alleviation schemes. There could be endless debate on the pros and cons of liberalization. But for developing economies, liberalization and reforms have worked only when it has been properly guided by some form of government intervention. Planning may therefore be still relevant so that market forces can be channelized to achieve the national objectives, one of which is alleviating poverty at least to some respectable level.
