Category: Poverty and the Poor

For our purposes, it will suffice to mention the measures adopted by the Planning Commission in recent years to identify the families Below the Poverty Line. We refer to the measures employed while drafting the Tenth Plan (2002–07). In its Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002–07) survey, BPL for rural areas was based on the degree of…

In 1977, the Government of Rajasthan initiated a programme named Antyodaya, meaning the rise of the last. This name was borrowed from one of the Gandhian strategies for the amelioration of poverty. The modality adopted for its operation was, however, very different. Antyodaya focused on individual poor families, particularly the poorest of the poor. For their identification, the Programme…

In their study of Poverty in India, V. M. Dandekar and Nilkanth Rath used the concept of poverty line. They constructed the poverty line based on the income required for a person to purchase a given calorie norm of food per day. At the 1960–61 price levels, these authors fixed poverty line at  15 for rural areas and  22.50…

It is calculated by converting GNP to US dollars on the basis of purchasing power parity rather than the exchange rate. The calculation is made by converting one unit of the currency (the US dollar, in this case) into the number of units of national currency required to buy some defined goods and services in…

It is the percentage of people who are below the poverty line. This Index does not measure the depth of poverty, however. When the sum of all poverty gaps is multiplied by the headcount index, the Poverty Gap Index is obtained.

This is used to measure the distance between the poverty line and the mean income of the poor. The formula used for this purpose is:   where y stands for the subsistence minimum, x for the income of the i-th observed household and N for the total number of households observed.

It is the ratio of expenditure on food to the lump sum of general expenses of a family. In 1992, the Russian government set the limit at 68 per cent for households, and 83 per cent for pensioners. Households or pensioners spending more than this sum on food were treated as poor. Using this yardstick, the…

It compares the average per capita income of the lowest 10 per cent with the average per capita income of the highest 10 per cent of the population. The greater the difference between them, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor. Similar comparisons are also made for the lowest 20 per cent…

This Index measures the extent to which the distribution of income, or consumption expenditure, among individuals/households deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative percentages of recipients, starting with the poorest. The Gini Index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a…

In Romania, three different measures are used, namely Subsistence Minimum (SM), Decent Minimum of Life (DM), and Minimum determined by the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection (MM). Subsistence Minimum, in the Romanian context, is said to refer to ‘absolute’ poverty, to draw the poverty line (but here absolute is not the synonym of destitution). The DM is the equivalent of…