Notes NCERT Class 11 Economics Chapter 4 Poverty

Chapter Notes Notes for Class 11

Please refer to Poverty Class 11 Economics Notes and important questions below. The Class 11 Economics Chapter wise notes have been prepared based on the latest syllabus issued for the current academic year by CBSE. Students should revise these notes and go through important Class 11 Economics examination questions given below to obtain better marks in exams

Poverty Class 11 Economics Notes and Questions

The below Class 11 Poverty notes have been designed by expert Economics teachers. These will help you a lot to understand all the important topics given in your NCERT Class 11 Economics textbook. Refer to Chapter 4 Poverty Notes below which have been designed as per the latest syllabus issued by CBSE and will be very useful for upcoming examinations to help clear your concepts and get better marks in examinations.

Introduction
 India has taken in the last seven decades and the outcome of these policies with relation to the various developmental indicators.
 Providing minimum basic needs to the people and reduction of poverty have been the major aims of independent India.
 The pattern of development that the successive five-year plans envisaged laid emphasis on the upliftment of the poorest of the poor (Antyodaya), integrating the poor into the mainstream and achieving a minimum standard of living for all.

How Are Poor People Identified?
 In pre-independent India, Dadabhai Naoroji was the first to discuss the concept of a Poverty Line.

Categorising Poverty: –
 There are many ways to categorise poverty. In one such way people who are always poor and those who are usually poor but who may sometimes have a little more money (example: casual workers) are grouped together as the chronic poor.
 Another group are the churning poor who regularly move in and out of poverty (example: small farmers and seasonal workers) and the occasionally poor who are rich most of the time but may sometimes have a patch of bad luck.
 They are called the transient poor. And then, there are those who are never poor and they are the non-poor.

The Poverty Line: –
 There are many ways of measuring poverty. One way is to determine it by the monetary value (per capita expenditure) of the minimum calorie intake that was estimated at 2,400 calories for a rural person and 2,100 for a person in the urban area.
 Based on this, in 2011-12, the poverty line was defined for rural areas as consumption worth Rs 816 per person a month and for urban areas it was Rs 1,000.

The Number of Poor In India
• The number of poor is estimated as the proportion of people below the poverty line, it is known as ‘Head Count Ratio’.
 The official data on poverty is made available to the public by the Planning Commission. It is estimated on the basis of consumption expenditure data collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO).

What Causes Poverty?
 The causes of poverty lie in the institutional and social factors that mark the life of the poor.
 The poor are deprived of quality education and unable to acquire skills which fetch better incomes. Also access to health care is denied to the poor.
 The main victims of caste, religious and other discriminatory practices are poor. These can be caused as a result of
I. Social, economic and political inequality
II. Social exclusion
III. Unemployment
IV. Indebtedness
V. Unequal distribution of wealth.

Policies and Programmes Towards Poverty Alleviation
 The Indian Constitution and five-year plans state social justice as the primary objective of the developmental strategies of the government.
 To quote the First Five Year Plan (1951-56), “the urge to bring economic and social change under present conditions comes from the fact of poverty and inequalities in income, wealth and opportunity”.
 The Second Five Year Plan (1956-61) also pointed out that “the benefits of economic development must accrue more and more to the relatively less privileged classes of society”.
 This second approach has been initiated from the Third Five Year Plan (1961-66) and progressively enlarged since then. One of the noted programmes initiated in the 1970s was Food for Work.
 Most poverty alleviation programmes implemented are based on the perspective of the Five-Year Plans.
 Expanding self-employment programmes and wage employment programmes are being considered as the major ways of addressing poverty. Examples of self-employment programmes are Rural Employment Generation Programme (REGP), Prime Minister’s Rozgar Yojana (PMRY) and Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana (SJSRY).

Poverty Alleviation Programmes – A Critical Assessment
 Efforts at poverty alleviation have borne fruit in that for the first time since independence, the percentage of absolute poor in some states is now well below the national average.
 Despite various strategies to alleviate poverty, hunger, malnourishment, illiteracy and lack of basic amenities continue to be a common feature in many parts of India.
 Though the policy towards poverty alleviation has evolved in a progressive manner, over the last five and a half decades, it has not undergone any radical transformation.
 Scholars, while assessing these programmes, state three major areas of concern which prevent their successful implementation.
 Due to unequal distribution of land and other assets, the benefits from direct poverty alleviation programmes have been appropriated by the non-poor.

Conclusion
We have travelled about six decades since independence. The objective of all our policies had been stated as promoting rapid and balanced economic development with equality and social justice.
 Poverty alleviation has always been accepted as one of India’s main challenges by the policy makers, regardless of which government was in power.
 Moreover, the fruits of development have not reached all sections of the population.
 Some sections of people, some sectors of the economy, some regions of the country can compete even with
developed countries in terms of social and economic development, yet, there are many others who have not been able to come out of the vicious circle of poverty.

Poverty Class 11 Economics Notes