In these web pages you will often come across the words ‘the poor’ and ‘poverty’. Let’s try and find out what it means when we call people poor.

By definition the poor lack something that other people have, usually material or economic things. They are in a state of poverty.

Newspapers and magazines regularly advertise cars or watches that cost lakhs of rupees. Yet we also see children begging on the streets, asking for a single rupee. We read about farmers killing themselves because they cannot pay off loans of Rs 20,000. Yet we come across people who spend that much money on a single meal!

It’s not too difficult to understand that there are rich people and there are people who do not have very much. You know that you get three or four meals a day. You have a computer on which you are reading this, a bed to sleep on, a doctor and medicines when you fall ill, and a school to go to. You don’t sleep out on the streets and you can play instead of working.

If we have a basic but good ‘standard of living’ as it’s called, we are not poor. If you live in Western Europe, the UK or the US and are officially called ‘poor’ by your government, you may have a comfortable place to live in, a car, a TV set, 24-hour water supply, electricity, schooling and school books for your children, and free medical care for you and your family. You may also be given a regular helping hand in the form of money, like a ‘salary’, by the government even though you do not have a job. This money may be just enough to buy food for yourself and your children. Such people would be called poor in rich countries, but by the standards of the poor in Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa they could actually be quite well off. This is called ‘relative poverty’.

All the things we commonly use to set standards, like a TV or car, are possessions that you can buy. But there are other things like running water and medical care that can be considered more important in the sense that they are more necessary than either the TV or the car. If you fell ill it wouldn’t really matter if you had a TV set or not. It would if you had no medical care. If you had no water to drink or to bathe in, it really wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have a car.

So perhaps we can make a standard out of the really necessary things and see who has them and who doesn’t. This standard could be used to see if anyone, in a rich or a poor country, is poor or not.

Can you list some of the basic necessities of life?
Food, a place to live, clothes, money, school, medicines…

Can you see how you could make these standards by which to judge poverty?
One way to do this is to get really, really basic. For example, we need food to stay alive. If you don’t have a minimum quantity of food, especially the type of food that gives you energy to do other things, you would die. So the minimum amount of food you need to survive (measured in calories, a unit of energy) every day is often used as a standard. You could do the same with medicines, but since people may not need medicines everyday, you look to see if they have ‘access to medicines’, that is, if they do fall sick would they be able to get to a doctor? Do they live too far away to be able to do so? Do they have enough money to travel to a hospital? Similarly, you can use regular access to clean drinking water as a standard.

Compared to ‘relative poverty’, these, or the lack of these, indicate ‘real’ or ‘absolute poverty’.

If you have food, clean water and medicines and a place to live, you will live a longer, healthier life. So you can use the length of a person’s life as a sign of whether he/she is rich or poor. In the same way, you could look at babies. An adult could perhaps go for a day or two without the basic necessities of food and water. But a baby needs these things all the time. And parents who can provide them. If a baby doesn’t have these basics it will die before it grows up. So another sign that is often used to measure poverty is the number showing what chances a baby has of growing up to become an adult.

Once you have the basic necessities, the next thing people generally want is to get an education so that they can get a job and earn money. A sign of education is being able to read and write, or ‘literacy’ -- that too is used as an indicator of poverty.

All these indicators are usually given as percentages -- for example, what percentage of the population has access to water -- which are then used to point out poor communities, villages or countries, rather than individual people.

Although poverty percentages are very useful, a problem with them is that comparisons between different communities and countries become difficult. Why? Because the availability of basic necessities vary with a person’s or people’s history or geography. If you are a poor rice-growing farmer you might have enough food, but the nearest school is miles away. Or, reading and writing may not be important to your community because when you grow up you will do what your parents did, so you would need to learn from them rather than go to school. If you live next to a mountain stream, access to water may mean nothing to you, but getting to a doctor could involve walking up and down mountains for hours if not days. It’s hard to total all these and come up with a single figure.

One way to get around this problem is to go back to thinking of the basic necessities as ‘possessions’, as things you can buy. Then ask how much money you would need to buy all these things. This, in fact, is what is usually done, and international organisations that need to study poverty usually work this way. Using local experts they convert, for example, access to water into how much it would cost to have access to water; access to medicines to the average price of medicines; and the calorific value of food to how much it would cost to buy that food.

This is a good way to go about it because it’s how things actually work. For example, if you were a farmer growing food you would sell anything you didn’t eat yourself to buy things like medicines or a water pump. Therefore money, or money-earning ability, becomes important. A level of earning can be fixed below which a person cannot afford to buy the ordinary basic things needed to live. At this level, people can at the most provide themselves with just the food needed to stay alive — considered to be about 2,100-2,400 calories a day — and with nothing else. This level is called the poverty line, and you often hear about poor people who ‘live below the poverty line’ or ‘BPL’. Keep in mind that this level does not include even the simplest sort of place to live or clothes or medical help when necessary, it’s just enough food to stay alive, the poorest you can be and live.

This line was first calculated in 1973 and the money needed to buy 2,100-2,400 calories of food then was about Rs 51 a month. Now, as the prices of food and other things have gone up, today the line is a little over Rs 454 for people living in cities and about Rs 327 for those in rural areas.  

You can also fix the poverty line globally. International organisations check with experts working in other countries to see what things cost in those countries. The figures are then converted into an international currency that everyone understands. Although not everyone agrees with this method of counting poverty, right now US$ 1 a day is fixed as the poverty line. Anyone who earns less than US$ 1 a day is internationally considered extremely poor.

--Manoj Nadkarni
InfoChange News & Features, March 2006