Rs 53 per day
Poverty, once thought to be the natural condition of a class of people, has metamorphosed into something of a problem with the maturity of the development discourse. From disease to terrorism, poverty is blamed for many things. The richer and more powerful and educated world class, therefore, is longer content with letting poor lead their lives in without intervening. They devise plans and policies to tackle this problem called poverty. Just like the need to ‘civilise’ the barbarians provided the moral foundation of colonialism, a modern mission rests comfortably on the need to ‘develop’ the underdeveloped world—and nothing certifies development better than elminating poverty. “Make poverty history,” claim activists and do-gooders around the world, completely oblivious to the fact that poverty is always relative: you cannot be rich or poor, you can only be richer or poorer than someone else.
This truth becomes problematic for development enthusiasts because of the political implications of relative poverty—if poverty is relative then you have to implement policies to eliminate the relative disparity in income and wealth. Therefore, it’s better to measure and emphasise absolute poverty. For once you have a group of people that are absolutely poor, what you fret
about is how to get them out of poverty, to lift them from under the poverty
line. It becomes easier to ignore the rich and the benefits they enjoy. The focus on absolute poverty instead of relative poverty, indeed, helps avoid thorny choices.
Here’s where the poverty line—the most common method of measuring absolute poverty—enters the picture. According to the preliminary result of the Nepal Living Standard Survey, 2011 published by the Central Statistics Division of the secretariat of the National Planning Commission—and carried out with monetary support from DFID (UK’s aid agency), Danida (Danish aid agency), World Food Programme, and the World Bank—exactly 25.16 percent of Nepal’s population lives below the poverty line, ie, out of the roughly 28 million Nepalis, roughly seven million live below the line. These are “the poor”.
And the statisticians have figured out how little you need to be make to be counted as poor. According to the Survey, on average, if you make less than Rs 19,261 in a year, you fall below the poverty line. On a daily basis, that income is equal to a few paisas below Rs 53 per day. Not to forget, this is the average for the whole of the country. If you live in urban Kathmandu, you need to make at least Rs 112 everyday to keep you above the poverty line, and if you live in Western Tarai, Rs 44 will keep you from sinking below the poverty line. The necessary incomes in other regions of the country lie somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
But how much can Rs 53 per day buy? According to the Survey, it is supposed to fulfill both food and non-food basic needs. Food needs are defined as being able to fulfill the daily caloric requirement of 2,200 Kcal per day on average, however that is achieved. As far as non-food needs go, “no objective minimum non-food requirement exists a priori,” says the survey. Nonetheless, it assumes that those living close to the food poverty line, “will spend the ‘minimum’ required to fulfil the non-food needs.”
Since there is an objective criterion for food needs, the minimum income required for daily survival can be further broken down to reflect just the food needs. If the survey is to be believed, the average monthly income required for food alone is Rs 1,000 per month, ie, Rs 33 per day. Again, were you to
live in Kathmandu, you would need Rs 40 per day, in Western Tarai, you would need Rs 29. The minimum for other areas of the country also vary between these two numbers.
It is using this benchmark that includes both food and non-food needs that statisticians say 25 percent of Nepalis are poor. Further, poverty in rural areas is almost double that of urban areas ( 15 and 27 percent). In terms of “development” regions, twice as many people in the Far Western region are “poor” compared to 21 percent of Eastern region. Within the rural areas, the rural hills of Mid and Far Western region have the highest number of the poor (39 percent) whereas the Eastern hills have the lowest (16 percent). Looking at urban areas, Hilly urban areas have the lowest numbers (9 percent), and the urban Tarai has the highest numbers (22 percent). Kathmandu—the only city for which poverty rate is calculated—has 11 percent of its inhabitants living below the poverty line.
Whetever the minimum income required to meet the minimum basic needs, and assuming that the methodology of the survey is accurate, it is apparent that the numbers vary wildly between geographic regions. Even more interesting is the incidence of povery along caste lines—the poverty rate among Dalits is almost twice that of non-Dalits ( 42 and 23 percent). Correlations also exists between povery rates and number of children in the household, education levels and
how far one lives from schools and roads, hospitals, bus stops, and banks, among other things.
Towards the end of the report, the survey includes two particularly interesting tables for those interested in the state of inequality. First, per capita consumption expenditure of the poorest 10 percent the people, on average, is nine times less than that of the richest 10 percent (Rs 11,093 and Rs 102,772). In terms of income, the average for the richest 10 percent is 26 times that of the poorest 10 percent.
These numbers help paint the bigger picture of inequality in Nepal. Based on the measurement of the Gini coefficient, the CIA factbook lists Nepal as the 29th least equal country in the world. Nepal is also the least equal country in South Asia. In Asia, only three other countries are less equal—Thailand, Singapore and Papua New Guinea. Globally, ten African countries and a dozen Latin American countries measure worse than Nepal. These numbers, sobering as they are, point to a dire need of intervention to reduce inequality.
Posted on: 2011-10-24 11:52
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