Rural Poverty in India: Structure, determinants and suggestions for policy reform Raghbendra Jha ABSTRACT Poverty, particularly rural poverty, has been one of the enduring policy challenges in India. Surely the most important objective of the reforms process would have been to make a significant dent on rural poverty. It is from this that a program of accelerated growth must draw its rationale. In this paper, I discuss the evolution of poverty in India – particularly during the reform period. Then I analyze the structure and determinants of this poverty. The rate of decline of poverty declined during the 1990s as compared to the 1980s. I advance some reasons for this. Policy prescriptions for a more effective anti poverty strategy are discussed. All correspondence to: Raghbendra Jha, Australia South Asia Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200 Fax: + 61 2 61250443 Phone: + 61 2 6125 2683 Email:
[email protected] 1 I. Introduction This paper addresses the important issue of anti-poverty policy in India. In analyzing poverty I use the well-known NSS data set; hence concentrating on consumption measures of poverty. The poverty measures used in this paper are all drawn from the popular Foster-Greer- Thorbecke class of functions written as: = − α Yα ∑[(z yi ) / z] / n (1) < yi z where Y is the measure of poverty, yi is the consumption of the ith household or the ith class of household, z is the poverty line1, n is the population size, and α is a non-negative parameter. The headcount ratio, HC, given by the percentage of the population who are poor is obtained when α=0.