Assessing Poverty Alleviation Strategies for Their Impact on Poor Women: Study with Special Reference to India

This paper is concerned with the way macro-economic strategies can affect the incidence of poverty, especially among women, and also with the effectiveness of various forms of government intervention in this regard. The focus is on India, but the analysis may have more general implications for other developing countries. The various concepts and definitions of poverty are discussed, and the continued relevance of the income criterion in assessing time-trends is mentioned. The trends in the incidence and pattern of poverty in India since the 1970s are also discussed, with some attempt at disaggregation by region, type of household and gender. It emerges that the period between 1973-74 and 1989-90 was characterized by a sustained decline in poverty ratios in both rural and urban India, and that this process is no longer clearly evident for the subsequent period of the 1990s. While traditional explanations of poverty incidence rely on agricultural growth and inflation rate, the observed trends suggest that other factors ó such as the effects of public expenditure and the relative price of foodgrain ó should be incorporated. Thus it is argued that the single most important reason for the decline in poverty ratios over the 1980s was the increase in real wages of unskilled labour in both urban and rural areas, which in turn was associated with the direct employment generation, as well as the multiplier, effects of substantially increased government expenditure evident throughout the 1980s. Similarly, the deceleration in such expenditure as well as the sharp increase in food prices related to the structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s have been associated with a reversal in the earlier downward trend in poverty for all India as well as most states.