The Hindu Business Line : `No let-up in urban poverty'

Hyderabad March 14 Despite economic indicators suggesting a growth of nine per cent per annum for India, "we constitute 40 per cent of the world's poor," the Director of Mumbai-based Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Prof. R. Radhakrishna, said.

In his lecture on `India's Development, Poverty Traps and Malnutrition Crisis' at Institute of Public Enterprises, Prof. Radhakrishna pointed that while in the year 2004-2005 the percentage of poor had reduced in rural areas, it had in fact increased in the urban areas.

While, the number of rural poor has gone down from 250 million in 1983 to 225 million in 2004-2005, the population of urban poor has increased from 67 million to 80 million during the same period.

The main reason for the same has been "migration" of people from rural to urban areas, and not because of better life standards in the countryside, he said.

CRISIS IN AGRICULTURE

"There has been a poor performance of agriculture since the mid-1990s and the reasons for that have been no public investment in agriculture, decline of rural credit and lack of adequate credit to agriculture," he said.

Maharashtra, Prof. Radhakrishna said, was high on the growth path but low in the rate of reduction of rural poverty. The rate has been 1.8 per cent during 1983-2005 and urban poverty reduction rate has been 1.4 per cent for the same period.

Andhra Pradesh on the other hand has registered 4.2 per cent in the first category while as low as 1.8 per cent in the second.

Talking of malnutrition, he said that improvements in nutritional status have not kept pace with the reduction in poverty. "The percentage of children suffering from malnutrition in rural areas declined rather slowly from 62.5 per cent in 1975-79 to 47.7 per cent in 2001-01."

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