What lies behind us or what lies before us are small matters when compared to what lies inside us.Ralph Waldo Emerson

India And Poverty

The very thing that made China a success story is inviting criticism of India—how their prosperity has, or in the case of India has not, lifted people out of poverty. In China about 13% of the population subsists on $1.25 a day or less. In India a third of the population lives on that amount. The prosperity has gone to the rich and to some extent the middle class. The level of poverty in certain regions such as that of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh is equivalent to that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the poorest countries in the world (if rich in resources) and one plagued by many years of civil way. For most people in India social mobility is only a dream. But Oxford University’s poverty and human development initiative which is using a new approach to measuring human deprivation found that some of the most impoverished countries in the world have seen a decrease in the number of the extremely poor in several nations and thinks that such extreme poverty could be eradicated within 20 years. Rwanda, Nepal and Bangladesh head that list. Close behind are reduction in extreme poverty in Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia. In between the example of China and the findings of the Oxford’s study, those of us who hate poverty hope that India can take heed and work harder on reducing its poverty.